Laravel (Community Edition) for Zed
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A community extension — not affiliated with Laravel LLC.
Listed on the Zed marketplace as Laravel (Community Edition); abbreviated to Laravel CE or laravel-ce wherever Zed's UI is tight (status bar, language-server list, progress titles).
Contents
- ❤️ Why we built this
- ⚖️ Which one should you use?
- ✨ Features
- 📦 Install
- ⚙️ Configuration
- 🩺 Troubleshooting
- 🚧 Planned Features
- 🤝 Contributing
❤️ Why we built this
We love Laravel, and we love Zed. When we moved our Laravel work into Zed, the deep, framework-aware tooling we'd relied on elsewhere wasn't there yet — so we built it. This extension exists to give Laravel first-class support in Zed, because a framework this good deserves great tooling everywhere its developers work.
The intelligence lives in a standalone language server (LSP) — the same protocol your editor already speaks for other languages. Today it targets Zed; because it's LSP-based, the same engine could reach other LSP-capable editors (Neovim, Helix, Sublime Text, and more) down the road. That's a direction we'd love to grow toward, not something we ship yet.
How it works — static analysis
Everything is parsed statically with tree-sitter: the extension reads your files, it never runs them. It only touches your database when you opt into schema-backed completion, and it keeps working even when your app won't boot — a half-applied migration, a missing .env, or a dirty branch won't stop it. Declared Eloquent magic is resolved statically through a project-wide semantic index — scopes, accessors, relationships, columns, and dynamic finders, in both property and call form, including builder chains. The honest trade-off: truly runtime-only behaviour (dynamic member names like $model->$attribute, runtime-registered routes) stays out of reach, and ambiguous sites are dropped rather than guessed.
⚡ Indexing performance. The extension indexes every PHP and Blade file in your project (including vendor/) at startup so find-references and goto-definition return instantly. A persistent on-disk cache makes subsequent project opens near-instant — only files whose mtime has changed since they were last indexed get re-parsed. External changes (a git pull, a composer install, a formatter running outside Zed) are picked up live via workspace/didChangeWatchedFiles. The status bar shows progress during the initial warmup.
⚖️ Which one should you use?
Laravel now ships an official Zed extension of its own. Both are good tools that answer the same questions in different ways: the official server boots your app via artisan tinker and asks the framework directly; this one reads your code and never runs it. Pick on that split — it's the part that won't change. Feature lists on both sides move every release.
⚠️ You probably shouldn't run both at the same time. Both register a language server for PHP and Blade, and both answer the same requests for the same patterns. Zed merges what every attached server returns, so running the pair tends to show you everything twice: two hover cards on one
view()call, duplicate completion entries, two diagnostics for a single missing view. Nothing breaks — it's just noisy, the same way running three PHP LSPs at once is. If you'd rather keep both installed, disable one with a"!"prefix in your PHP / Bladelanguage_serverslist.
| Choose Laravel CE — reads your code, never runs it | Choose the official extension — asks your running app directly |
|---|---|
You spend time on branches where the app isn't always runnable: a half-applied migration, a missing .env, an unregistered provider, a database you're not connected to. Parsing carries on regardless. |
Your app boots cleanly on demand, and you'd like Laravel itself to be the source of truth |
| You open packages, libraries, and shared component sets — repos with no application at the root | You work on full applications, where running the app is already part of the loop |
You like knowing your editor only ever reads: no provider boot(), no container, nothing executed on your behalf |
You're glad to have the editor run artisan tinker for you — it's what you'd type by hand to answer the same question |
| You want what's written — the code on disk right now, including edits you haven't run yet | You want what's resolved — runtime-registered routes, computed config, and container state only a booted kernel can report |
| You want re-indexing to stay cheap and incremental: an mtime-based cache, only changed files re-parsed | You want each index gathered fresh from the framework, so what you see matches what your app would do right now |
| You want tooling that works the moment you clone a repo, with no PHP runtime to locate first | Your PHP environment is set up and humming (Herd / Valet / Sail / Lando / DDEV), and you want tooling that runs on the very same runtime your app does |
⚖️ Full comparison → — Laravel tooling across editors, plus architecture, LSP capabilities, and a feature-by-feature snapshot against the official extension.
✨ Features
Each feature has a focused reference under docs/ — click through to dive in.
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| 🔗 Go-to-Definition | Jump to views, components, routes, config, translations, env, assets, middleware, bindings, Artisan commands — plus query-chain columns / relations / tables and Eloquent magic members |
| ℹ️ Hover | Intelephense-style summary cards for every recognised pattern, including semantic cards for Eloquent magic (scopes, accessors, relationships, cast-aware column types) |
| 🔍 Find References | Every call site across the project, vendor packages included — including the magic-member usages Intelephense can't see |
| ✏️ Rename | Atomic rename of routes, configs, translations, env vars, views, components, Livewire, middleware, bindings, PHP classes (models, controllers, jobs, services, form requests), magic members, function-local PHP variables, database columns (migration included) — and scope-aware Blade template variables, including the controller→view view('x', ['key' => …]) / compact('key') binding linkage |
| 🔢 Code Lens | Opt-in reference counts above magic members, routes, config / translation / env keys, and Blade templates — plus an unused-symbol warning |
| 💡 Autocomplete | Cast types, model properties, query chains, builder methods, Blade / loop / slot variables, Pennant flags |
| ❌ Diagnostics | Missing views / components / features, invalid rules, query-chain typos against your real schema |
| ⚡ Quick Actions | One-click create missing views, components, middleware, features, and migrations |
| 🎨 Blade Editing | Directive autocomplete, smart bracket expansion, closing-tag navigation |
| 🗺️ Outline Panel | Laravel-aware route + Blade structure in Zed's outline and breadcrumbs |
🌱 Quiet .env files |
Why shellcheck's false "appears unused" warning fires on every .env line, and four one-time settings you can apply to silence it |
📦 Install
Search "Laravel" in Zed Extensions and install Laravel (Community Edition).
The official Laravel extension shows up in the same search results — you'll probably want just one of the two.
🤝 Recommended companions
Also install the following extensions for a more complete experience:
- Laravel Blade extension (
bajrangCoder/zed-laravel-blade) for Blade-related fetures, syntax highlighting, etc. - PHP (Intelephense) for php intellisense functionality
- phpcs PHP CodeSniffer linting
- phpmd PHP Mess Detector linting
From source
Clone the repo, run cargo build --release in laravel-lsp/, then use "zed: install dev extension".
⚙️ Configuration
The extension works out of the box with zero configuration — it auto-discovers your view paths, component namespaces, route files, and service providers. Everything else is optional.
⚠️ The one thing that trips people up. If you set an explicit
language_serverslist for PHP or Blade (common when pinning a PHP LSP), that list replaces Zed's defaults — you must include"laravel-lsp"or the extension won't attach. Symptom: features work in.envfiles but do nothing in.php/.blade.php.
⚙️ Full settings reference → — every option at its default (autocomplete debounce, Blade directive spacing, code lens, diagnostic severity), the third-party LSP tweaks, database-connection setup, and the outline-panel toggles.
🩺 Troubleshooting
Installed, but nothing happens? The usual causes, in order: Zed older than 0.205 (the minimum this extension builds against), the file isn't classified as PHP / Blade, or a language_servers override that omits laravel-lsp.
🩺 Troubleshooting guide → — the full seven-step decision tree, the duplicate-results fix when a second PHP LSP is attached, why F2 rename on a class name can go missing next to PHPantom, how to read the language-server log, and the manual binary fallback for blocked downloads.
🚧 Planned Features
Rename — remaining work (the class-backed kinds, the FQCN class-rename engine across all common PHP class kinds, magic members, database columns, function-local PHP variables, and scope-aware Blade template variables shipped):
- 🔧 Class-property rename —
$this->foo,self::$bar, and dynamic property access have different reference shapes than local variables, so they get their own scope-aware pass.
Framework integrations:
- 🎨 Inertia.js support — go-to-definition and autocomplete for
Inertia::render('Page')calls - 📁 Folio page routing — surface Folio's filesystem-routed pages in goto-definition / completion / find-references
🤝 Contributing
Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for the project layout, local development setup, building the LSP, running tests, and code style.