Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a popular code editor among developers for its versatility and extensive ecosystem of extensions. For PHP Laravel web development, having the right extensions can greatly improve your coding experience and productivity. Following are the best Visual Studio Code extensions for PHP Laravel web development.
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Extensions for Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions are add-ons or plugins that enhance the functionality of the Visual Studio Code editor. These extensions can provide additional features, language support, themes, tools, and integrations, allowing developers to customize their coding environment to suit their needs.
You will find all the list of Visual Studio Code extensions here.
Follow the below steps to search the below extensions in the Visual Studio Code Editor –
- Open Visual Studio Code.
- Go to the Extensions view by clicking on the Extensions icon in the Activity Bar on the side of the window or using the shortcut
Ctrl+Shift+X(Windows/Linux) orCmd+Shift+X(macOS). - Search for “Laravel” or “PHP” to find extensions related to Laravel development.
Auto Close Tag
Auto Close Tag – Jun Han is an extension that enhances the HTML and XML coding experience by automatically closing HTML or XML tags as you type. This extension is particularly useful for web developers working on projects that involve a lot of HTML or XML markup.
Rainbow Brackets
Rainbow Brackets – 2gua extension provide rainbow colors for the round brackets, the square brackets and the squiggly brackets. This is particularly useful for JavaScript and other programming language.
Beautify Blade
Beautify – Apility AS usually refers to the process of formatting or organizing code to make it more readable and aesthetically pleasing without changing its functionality. In the case of Blade templates in Laravel, beautifying typically involves formatting the HTML and Blade syntax in a consistent and visually appealing way like indentation, line breaks, spacing and wrapping code.
PHP Intelephense
PHP Intelephense – Ben Mewburn is a PHP language server that provides intelligent code completion, navigation, and analysis features for PHP development within the Visual Studio Code environment. It is designed to enhance the development experience by offering features like:
PHP Namespace Resolver
PHP Namespace Resolver – Mehedi Hassan can import and expand your class. You can also sort your imported classes by line length or in alphabetical order.
PHP Intellisense
PHP Intellisense – Damjan Cvetko is the extension although not Laravel-specific, this extension provides enhanced PHP support, including better code completion, parameter hints, goto definition, find all references, hover, and more.
Laravel Extra Intellisense
Laravel Extra Intellisense – amir is the extension enhances PHP IntelliSense for Laravel, providing additional features related to Laravel often enhance support for Laravel-specific features, such as Blade templates, Eloquent models, and Laravel-specific functions.
Laravel Blade Snippets
Laravel Blade Snippets – Winnie Lin it likely provides snippets of code for the Blade templating engine used in Laravel. Blade is a lightweight yet powerful templating engine provided with Laravel for creating views. Snippets can be predefined pieces of code or templates that you can quickly insert into your code to enhance productivity.
These snippets might include common Blade syntax, such as:
- Blade directives (
@if,@foreach,@section, etc.) - Control structures
- Blade echo statements (
{{ }}) - Extending layouts (
@extends,@yield) - Form components (
@csrf,@method, etc.)
Laravel Snippets
Laravel Snippets – Winnie Lin extension, enhance the development experience for Laravel developers by offering code snippets for commonly used Laravel features and syntax. Snippets are short, pre-written pieces of code that can be quickly inserted into your code, saving you time and reducing the likelihood of errors.
Features include:
- Blade Snippets: Snippets for common Blade templating syntax used in Laravel views.
- Route Snippets: Quick shortcuts for defining routes in your Laravel routes file.
- Model Snippets: Predefined code snippets for creating Eloquent models.
- Controller Snippets: Snippets for generating controller methods and boilerplate code.
- Migration Snippets: Shortcuts for creating database migrations.
- Testing Snippets: Snippets for common Laravel testing functions and methods.
Laravel Blade Spacer
Laravel Blade Spacer – Austen Cameron it might be designed to help with automatically formatting and standardizing the spacing and indentation in Blade templates. It can be beneficial for maintaining a consistent coding style and enhancing the readability of your Blade views.
Laravel Goto Components
Laravel Goto Components – naoray extension is designed to enhance the development experience when working with Laravel’s Blade components. It is used for quick jump to components with CTRL + click.
Features such as:
- Go to Component Definition: Quickly navigate to the definition of a Blade component to see its code and structure.
- Find References: Identify all places where a specific Blade component is used in your Laravel project.
- Code Completion: Provide intelligent code completion suggestions when working with Blade components.
- Integration with Editors: Seamless integration with popular text editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) commonly used in Laravel development.
- Improved Component Navigation: Streamlined navigation between components, making it easier to work with and understand the component-based structure of a Laravel project.
Tailwind CSS IntelliSense
Tailwind CSS IntelliSense – Tailwind Labs extension is a popular tool designed to enhance the development experience for projects that use Tailwind CSS. Features inclues such as intelligent autocomplete, class attribute completion, intuitive class name suggestions, hover previews and more.
DotENV
DotENV – mikestead extension provide VSCode .env syntax highlighting.
