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anil/comments

A full-featured commenting system for Laravel. Attach comments to any Eloquent model with threaded replies, reactions, guest commenting, approval workflows, and a framework-agnostic UI — all in one package.

Features

• Comment on any Eloquent model (polymorphic)
• Threaded replies with configurable nesting depth
• Reactions system (like/dislike, or any custom types)
• Guest commenting with honeypot spam protection
• Comment approval workflow
• Soft deletes (opt-in)
• Pagination (top-level comments)
• Rate limiting
• Authorization via Laravel gates/policies
• Events dispatched on create, update, and delete
• Framework-agnostic UI (no Bootstrap or Tailwind required)
• Gravatar avatars with color-coded initials fallback
• 13 supported locales
• Full REST API
• Support for multiple User models and non-integer IDs
• N+1 query optimized

Screenshots

Guest user (guest commenting enabled — name and email fields shown):

Logged-in user (comment form without guest fields, reply button visible):

Logged-out user (guest commenting disabled — authentication prompt shown):

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• Laravel 11, 12, or 13

Installation

Setup

1. Add Commenter trait to your User model

2. Add Commentable trait to any model you want to comment on

3. Render the comments component in your view

That's it. The package auto-detects the authenticated user and renders the full comment UI.

Blade Component Options

Pagination

Pagination applies to top-level comments only. A parent comment and all of its replies count as one "page unit" — so perPage => 2 shows two parent comments plus all their children.

Nesting depth

By default replies nest up to level 3:

Replies beyond the max depth are shown at the deepest level. Override per-component with maxIndentationLevel or globally via config (max_depth).

Configuration

Publish the config file:

Key options in config/comments.php:

Publishing Assets

Authorization

The package registers Laravel gates backed by CommentPolicy:

You can override the gate-to-policy mappings in config/comments.php under permissions, or publish and modify CommentPolicy directly.

Reactions

Reactions are enabled by default. Each user can have one reaction per comment. Sending the same reaction type again removes it (toggle). Sending a different type switches it.

Configure types in config/comments.php:

Any string values are valid reaction types.

Guest Commenting

When guest_commenting is enabled, unauthenticated users can submit comments with a guest_name and guest_email. Honeypot spam protection (via spatie/laravel-honeypot) is automatically applied.

Disable guest commenting to show a login prompt instead:

Events

The package dispatches the following events (all implement SerializesModels for queued listeners):

Register listeners in your EventServiceProvider as normal.

REST API

All routes are prefixed with /comments and named with comments.*.

POST /comments

Guest fields (required when unauthenticated and guest commenting is enabled):

PUT /comments/{comment}

POST /comments/{comment} (reply)

POST /comments/{comment}/react

Returns:

Queryable Methods (Commentable trait)

These methods are available on any model using the Commentable trait:

Lifecycle Hooks

You can define these methods on your Comment model (after publishing and extending) or on your commentable model to run custom logic around comment operations:

The service layer calls these hooks when they exist — no base implementation is required.

Localization

The package ships with translations for 13 locales:

ar, ca, de, en, es, fr, in, it, ja, nl, np, pt, ru

Publish translations to customize or add new locales:

Custom Controller

To extend or replace the controller, set the controller key in config:

Your controller must implement Anil\Comments\CommentControllerInterface or extend Anil\Comments\CommentController.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.