Five Useful Laravel Blade Directives

We’re going to look at five Laravel Blade directives you can use to simplify your templates, and learn about some convenient directives that make solving specific problems a cinch! If you’re new to the framework, these tips will help you discover the excellent features of Blade, Laravel’s templating engine.

Let’s get started.

1. Check if the user is authenticated

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When checking if the user is authenticated, you could check if the user isn’t null:

@if(auth()->user())
    // The user is authenticated.
@endif

However, Laravel ships with a custom Blade directive that provides the same functionality more cleanly:

@auth
    // The user is authenticated.
@endauth

2. Check if the user is a guest

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The inverse of the authentication, we can check if the user is not authenticated using the guest() method on the auth helper:

@if(auth()->guest())
    // The user is not authenticated.
@endif

But Laravel also provides a @guest directive:

@guest
    // The user is not authenticated.
@endguest

We can also combine those two directives using the else statement:

@guest
    // The user is not authenticated.
@else
    // The user is authenticated.
@endguest

3. Include the first view if it exists or includes the second if it doesn’t

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Building a website with multiple themes might require including a file if it exists or including another one if it doesn’t, you can easily achieve this with simple blade conditions:

@if(view()->exists('first-view-name'))
    @include('first-view-name')
@else
    @include('second-view-name')
@endif

There is a shorter and a much cleaner directive for including the first found template:

@includeFirst(['first-view-name', 'second-view-name']);

4. Include a view based on a condition

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Conditionally including a view based on a condition is useful when you only want to add content based on logic like an authenticated user.

You could write this using an @if condition:

@if($post->hasComments())
    @include('posts.comments')
@endif

We can more cleanly include a view based on a condition with the @includeWhen directive with one line:

@includeWhen($post->hasComments(), 'posts.comments');

5. Include a view if it exists

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If you have custom themes system or you dynamically create your Blade views, then checking if the file exists a mandatory thing to do.

Calling the exists method on the view helper will do the trick:

@if(view()->exists('view-name'))
    @include('view-name')
@endif

But it turns out there is a simple way of handling this using the includeIf Blade directive:

@includeIf('view-name')

You can learn about these and other useful tricks in the official Blade documentation for improving your frontend templating in a Laravel project.

Happy refactoring!