My opinionated intro to Laravel Breeze

Whoa, it's been. A couple of weeks since I posted, it's almost like I bagged myself a gold badge for my consistency and lost motivation or something. 🥇

3 Cheers for Gamification.

Truth be told life got in the way. I'd been putting my learning time into a work project with a tight deadline.

My current day job has me diving headfirst into the no-code Webflow platform to build a mega menu among many things, which has been driving me insane. These no-code tools have me jumping through too many hoops to make changes that would otherwise be a breeze if I had I just had access to the code directly.

I'm not trying to be negative about Webflow or no-code tools, I can see the appeal, it's just I feel you see things a little differently sometimes when you have a little bit of knowledge of what's going on behind the scenes.

Anyway speaking of breezes, I have been spending a bit of time learning Laravel Breeze which is Laravel's basic authentication scaffolding add-on.

So, in the interest of learning by explaining, here are a few things I've taken from my experiences of tinkering with Breeze.

1). It's a scaffolding for Laravel authentication systems; it contains what I need for a login system. A battle-tested tool developers can rely on when starting a project where they will need authentication without having to build it themselves.

2). When installing Laravel Breeze, I can install it automatically when starting a new project.

larvel new ProjectName --breeze --pest

Laravel new ProjectName is standard for creating a new Laravel Installation

--breeze also install Breeze at the same time

--pest sets the project up for Pest testing rather than Unit testing

3). Breeze gives me the middleware functionality for:

A login page
Registration
Validation
Email a Forgotten Password (this is a whole other upcoming post)
Rules

4). Breeze incorporates Tailwind a CSS framework I've been taking a closer look at recently

5). Breeze doesn't initially separate the front-end and back-end views or controllers.

And this is where this intro to Breeze starts to get opinionated. I wanted to clearly define what was the front end and the back end and this immediately meant I needed to customize Breeze and refactor its initial structure so that I had sections I could at a glance see we're going to contain my front end content as opposed to mixing it all together.

I understand why Breeze does things this way; it's a developer's toolkit and was never designed as a fully featured framework. Who's to say the user even intends to have a front end?

But my personal preference was to start by having a clear separation between the two since my project would have a front end.

6). Breeze uses Vite for its development server. I love the hot reload overall, it's a great experience.

Overall, I would recommend Breeze as an excellent starting point for small projects without customization or external dependencies. It's simple and easy to get started.