Laravel Nova is a beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel applications. It provides a user-friendly interface for managing your application's data and resources. While Nova offers an extensive range of features out of the box, there might be cases where you need to create custom functionality to tailor the admin panel to your specific needs. In this post, we'll walk through an example of how to build a custom admin panel with Laravel Nova.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you have a Laravel application up and running with Laravel Nova installed. You can follow the official Laravel Nova documentation to set up Nova in your project.

Creating a Custom Tool

Laravel Nova allows you to create custom tools that integrate seamlessly with the admin panel. Let's build a simple tool to manage user roles.

Generate the Tool

Use the following artisan command to generate a new tool:

php artisan nova:tool UserRoleManager

This will create a new tool named UserRoleManager in the app/Nova/Tools directory.

Defining the Tool

Open the generated tool file (app/Nova/Tools/UserRoleManager.php) and define the tool's card. The card will display the tool's user interface in the admin panel.

use Laravel\Nova\Card;

class UserRoleManager extends Card
{
    public function component()
    {
        return view('nova-tool-user-role-manager::card');
    }
}

Creating the Card View

Create a new Blade view file named card.blade.php inside the resources/views/nova-tool-user-role-manager directory. This view will be the user interface for our custom tool.

<card class="flex flex-col items-center justify-center p-8">
    <h2 class="text-xl font-bold mb-4">User Role Manager</h2>
    <p>Here, you can manage user roles.</p>
</card>

Registering the Tool

Open the nova-components.json file at the root of your Laravel project and add the following configuration to register your custom tool:

{
    "resources": [
        // ...
    ],
    "tools": {
        "user-role-manager": {
            "name": "User Role Manager",
            "path": "app/Nova/Tools/UserRoleManager"
        }
    }
}

Clear the Cache

To ensure that Laravel Nova recognizes your new custom tool, clear the cache by running:

php artisan optimize

Accessing the Custom Tool

After completing the steps above, you should now see a new "User Role Manager" card in your Laravel Nova dashboard. Clicking on it will display the content of the card.blade.php view we created earlier.

Adding Functionality

To add functionality to your custom tool, you can utilize Laravel's routes, controllers, and models just like you would in any other Laravel application. For example, you could create a controller to manage user roles and interact with your database, then use it within the card.blade.php view to display data and perform CRUD operations.

Laravel Nova provides a powerful platform to build custom admin panels tailored to your application's requirements. By creating custom tools, you can extend Nova's capabilities and streamline your administrative tasks. Remember to explore Nova's documentation to take full advantage of all the features it offers!

That's it for building a custom admin panel with Laravel Nova! Have fun customizing and optimizing your Laravel application's admin interface!