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Blast — Storybook for Laravel Blade 🚀

What is Blast?

Blast is a low maintenance component library using Storybook Server, built to integrate into your Laravel apps.

Blast allows you to render examples of your app's components using the blade templating engine using Storybook Server within your Laravel app.

We've published some articles to help you get started with Blast and it's features:

• Getting Started with Blast – Storybook for Laravel Blade
• Auto-visualizing Tailwind Tokens and Documenting Design Systems Props with Blast

Install

You may need to configure your app's assets in config/blast.php after install. To publish the configuration file, use:

Start Storybook

From your app's root directory run:

This will install all of the dependencies, generate stories and start a Storybook instance, as well as a watch task so updates to .md and .blade.php files in resources/views/stories and .php files in resources/views/stories/data will automatically regenerate the stories and update Storybook.

Options

• --install - force install dependencies
• --noGenerate - skip auto-generating stories based on existing components
• --port - port used to run Storybook

Generating Stories

Blast can also generate stories outside of the launch task. You can do this by running:

Options

• --watch - watches the story blade files and updates stories

Storybook Configuration

Global configuration can be done through the config/blast.php.

Blast uses the public_path() to reference any static assets. This means that any assets in that directory will be available during developement as well as static builds published to the public directory using the blast:publish task.

Options

storybook_version

Allows the use of a different version of Storybook. Blast has only been tested up to 7.1.1.

Default: '7.1.1'

storybook_server_url

The route Storybook Server uses to render components. You shouldn't need to change this as it isn't ever visible on the FE.

Default: config('app.url') . '/storybook_preview'

auto_documentation

Blast can automatically generate documentation pages in the form of stories based on your Tailwind config. Use this array to specify which documentation pages to generate. All options are loaded by default.

Default:

tailwind_config_path

The path to your Tailwind config file. Used to parse the auto-documentation.

Default: base_path('tailwind.config.js')

storybook_expanded_controls

See https://storybook.js.org/docs/react/essentials/controls Set to true to enable full documentation on the controls tab. Enabling this feature will require configuration in the @storybook blade directive, see description, defaultValue and table array keys in the blade directive configuration.

Default: true

storybook_theme

The array of theme options used by Storybook. More info here. The options are normal, dark or custom. Normal and dark themes are out of the box from the @storybook-theming addon. To add a custom theme edit values in the storybook_custom_theme array in config/blast.php.

Default: 'normal'

storybook_docs_theme

With the same options as storybook_theme this configures the theme applied to the docs tab.

Default: 'normal'

storybook_custom_theme

An array passed to the @storybook-theming addon to create a custom theme. HTML color names, RGB and HEX colors are all supported.

canvas_bg_color

Set the background color of the component canvas area. The Storybook theme doesn't allow this without also changing the background of other areas of the UI.

Default: ''

autoload_assets

Blast will attempt to autoload assets from a mix-manifest.json (Laravel Mix) or manifest.json (Vite - added in 1.7) if the assets arrays are empty. This option allows you to disable that functionality. Note that the Vite assets are only auto loaded from a prod build. If you want to use it with Vite's hot reloading, you will need to manually define it in the asset array using the full local url (eg. http://127.0.0.1:5173/resources/css/app.css), or you can publish and modify the storybook.blade.php view to use Laravel's @vite helper.

Default: true

mix_manifest_path

Allows you to customize the path to the mix-manifest file used to autoload assets.

Default: public_path('mix-manifest.json')

vite_manifest_path

Allows you to customize the path to the vite manifest file used to autoload assets.

Default: public_path('build/manifest.json')

assets

An array of urls to the css and js used by your components. The css and js urls are seperated out as the css is included in the head and the js is included before the closing body tag. js assets can have types (default: text/javascript).

You can also group assets and specify which to use for different components.

In your story blade file you would select the assets to use with assetGroup.

Default: [ 'css' => [], 'js' => [], ]

storybook_statuses

Blast ships with the Status Addon by Etch. This allows you to add custom status indicators to each component. This option allows you to customise these status indicators. More information on this can be found in the Custom Status section below.

Default:

storybook_sort_order

Define a custom order for the stories. Accepts an array of story names and can contain nested arrays to set the order of 2nd tier stories. More information can be found in the official Storybook Docs.

Default: [] (alphabetical)

storybook_global_types

The Global Types can be used, for example, to extend and edit the toolbar. The array of toolbars and globals options used by Storybook. More info here.

Default: []

storybook_default_view_mode

Set the default view for each story to either the Canvas or Docs view. This can be overridden in each story using the viewMode prop in the @storybook directive. Use the value story for the canvas view and docs for the docs view. If set to false it will use the last used view when changing between stories.

Default: false

build_timeout

Set a custom timeout for tasks in launch and generate-stories

Default: 300

vendor_path

The relative path to the Blast package directory

Default: vendor/area17/blast

components

An array of custom components used by Blast.

Default: [ 'docs-page' => Components\DocsPages\DocsPage::class ]

storybook_viewports

Configure custom viewports in the Storybook preview toolbar.

It supports an array with the structure found in the Storybook docs and it can also use your Tailwind config to generate the viewports for you by setting the value to 'tailwind'. Defaults to 'tailwind' but fails silently if blast can't find a Tailwind config. The viewports can be disabled by setting to false.

It supports the various ways you can define breakpoints in Tailwind using these rules:

• If the value is a string, it uses that
• If the value is an array with only a min or only a max it will use that value
• If the value is an array with both a min and max value it will use the min value
• raw values will be ignored

Default: 'tailwind'

Story Configuration

There are certain Storybook elements you can configure from within your story blade files. You can do this by adding the @storybook directive to the top of your files:

The supported options for this directive are:

• preset - Use a preset as the base for the component story. Setting options in this directive will override the preset
• name - Overrides the auto generated name in the Storybook sidebar.
• layout - Set the component layout in canvas area. Options are fullscreen, padded, centered (default).
• status - adds a status badge to the component story. Can be configured in the package config. See below for more info.
• order - Customize the order of each story. Supports float values. Defaults to alphabetical order.
• design - a Figma url for the component or array of design parameters. You can read more about the supported options here
• args - an array of static data used to create storybook fields. You can read more about that here. The keys in the array are passed to the blade view and updated when the fields are updated in storybook.
• argTypes - an array to define the args used for the controls. You can read more about them here
• actions.handles - an array defining the events that are passed to the @storybook-actions addon. You can read more about actions here - See the Action Event Handlers heading.

Customizing the story view

You can customize a lot of the story component view from within config/blast.php but if you need to take it a step futher you can publish the view to your application folder and modify it there.

This will publish storybook.blade.php and all of the ui-docs components to resources/views/vendor/blast.

Demo Components

Running php artisan blast:demo will create all the files needed to display a demo component. It creates files in your resources/views/components and resources/views/stories directories and generates the stories.

It can be run alongside the php artisan blast:launch task or you can run the demo task and then the launch task after to init Storybook.

Presetting story options

You can create preset options for components to reuse throughout your storybook instance.

The preset options use the same structure as Laravel config files:

You can preset any of the options available in the @storybook directive.

To use the preset, set the preset option to the array path (using "dot" notation) where the first part is the name of the file followed by the option you wish to access.

In this example it would update the label from 'Primary' to 'Read More'.

Presetting data

In some instances it is beneficial to reuse data from other components in a new component. For example, a post list may use data for multiple post components.

To do this, you can reference the data in your new component's data file in a similar way to how you would set the preset in your story.

Use the presetArgs key to define the args with which you would like to data from another component. You can set the presets to either an array of references, or a single reference.

The example below creates the items array used in a card-list component using data from the card stories.

Custom Status

Blast comes with 4 preset statuses to use in your stories - deprecated, wip, readyForQA and stable. You can define custom statuses in config/blast.php by passing and array of statuses the storybook_statuses config. For example:

More infomation on this addon can be found here.

Note: Defining custom statuses will override the existing statuses.

Documentation

Adding a README.md to your storybook blade directory will allow you to add a documentation page for the component in Storybook. The content of the markdown file will be output above the auto-generated Storybook content.

You can also add a markdown file with the same name as your story file and it will add the documentation to component variation on the documentation page.

Publish Static Storybook

Blast can build a static Storybook app and publish it to your public folder. You do this by running:

Generate Tailwind Documenatation Stories

Blast can automatically generate stories to visualize your Tailwind configuration. See 'auto_documentation' above to see how to configure which stories to generate.

You can pass the option --force to automatically overwrite existing documenation stories or use the --update-data option to update the story data without copying any files (this option only works if you have already run the task before).

Options

• --o, --output-dir - the directory where to store built files relative to your public directory

Publish Storybook Config

There may be times when you need to publish the storybook config files to your application directory (eg. changing Storybook versions). This copies the .storybook directory to your application root directory and updates the launch and publish tasks to use this directory for any Storybook configuration.

Troubleshooting

If you see a Failed to fetch message when viewing your stories you will need to go to the path that Storybook is trying to load (open dev tools > network and right click the failed path and open in a new tab) and debug there. Any php errors or dd will trigger the Failed to fetch message.

Known Issues

• Renaming the story blade files can sometimes result in the story for that component being duplicated. You can work around this by running php artisan blast:generate-stories