Laradocs

Maintain beautiful, version-controlled documentation inside your Laravel codebase. Write markdown, commit it next to the code it describes, and Laradocs serves a polished docs site at /docs (or wherever you like).

composer require petebishwhip/laradocs
php artisan laradocs:install

Then open /docs.

Requirements

Features

• 📁 Multi-level file structure — nested folders become nested navigation.
• 🔗 Filename or metadata routing — slug: front-matter overrides paths.
• 📝 Markdown → HTML powered by CommonMark (GFM, tables, footnotes, …).
• 🏷️ Rich per-file metadata — title, description, order, hidden, group, badge, redirect, tags, and more.
• 🎨 Polished default UI — responsive, dark-mode, sidebar, breadcrumbs, on-page table of contents, prev/next — all publishable and overridable.
• ⚡ Smart caching — rendered HTML cached and auto-invalidated on file change.
• 🧩 Variables & macros — interpolate {{ values }} and reuse @docs() blocks, with a service-provider API to register your own.
• 🖼️ Rich content — callouts (> [!NOTE]), syntax-highlighted code with a copy button, lazy images with captions, and local/YouTube/Vimeo video embeds.
• 🔎 Automatic SEO — <title>, meta description, Open Graph & Twitter cards, canonical URLs and JSON-LD for every page, with per-page front-matter overrides.
• 🗺️ Sitemap — an auto-generated sitemap.xml at {prefix}/sitemap.xml, cached and invalidated alongside the rest of the docs cache.
• 🤖 llms.txt — an llmstxt.org index at {prefix}/llms.txt so language models can map every page in one request, optionally served from /llms.txt as well.
• 📚 llms-full.txt — opt-in companion at {prefix}/llms-full.txt carrying the entire documentation corpus in one response instead of links.
• 💬 AI chat: an opt-in assistant that answers from your pages, built on the Laravel AI SDK so any provider it supports answers with your own key. Respects your visibility rules, streams its answer into an embeddable widget, calls your own MCP servers, and hands every exchange to a callback so you can meter the tokens.
• ✅ Fully tested — Pest + Testbench, 100% coverage gate, PHPStan & Psalm max, Pint.

Quick start

Create a page:

php artisan make:doc guide/getting-started --title="Getting Started" --order=1

---
title: Getting Started
description: Install and configure the app.
order: 1
group: Basics
---

# Getting Started

> [!TIP]
> Folders become sidebar sections; `_index.md` is a section's landing page.

Configuration

Everything is configurable in config/laradocs.php and via environment variables — route prefix/domain, docs path, routing strategy, theme, caching and more. See the Configuration docs.

LARADOCS_ROUTE_PREFIX=docs
LARADOCS_THEME=auto
LARADOCS_ENABLED=true

The Laradocs facade

use Laradocs\Facades\Laradocs;

Laradocs::variables(fn () => ['version' => '1.0.0']);
Laradocs::share('app_name', config('app.name'));
Laradocs::macro('tweet', fn (array $args) => "<a href=\"...\">@{$args['user']}</a>");

// AI chat hooks.
Laradocs::onChat(fn (ChatExchange $exchange) => AiUsage::record($exchange));
Laradocs::chatContext(fn (ChatRequest $request) => "The reader is on the {$request->user?->plan} plan.");
Laradocs::chatAuthorize(fn (Request $request) => $request->user()?->hasVerifiedEmail());

Artisan commands

Publishing

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laradocs-config
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laradocs-views
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laradocs-assets
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laradocs-lang

Testing

composer test

Local development (workbench)

The package ships an orchestra/testbench workbench — a disposable Laravel app used to run Laradocs as a real, browsable site while you work on the package itself, rather than through Pest alone.

composer serve

This builds the workbench (testbench workbench:build) and boots it at /docs. The generated app lives at vendor/orchestra/testbench-core/laravel — it's regenerated on demand and isn't committed to git.

By default the workbench has no docs content, so /docs renders an empty state. Point it at the real docs in this repo (so edits under docs/ show up immediately, thanks to Laradocs' mtime-based cache) by adding to the workbench's .env:

# vendor/orchestra/testbench-core/laravel/.env
LARADOCS_PATH=/absolute/path/to/laradocs/docs

Or seed your own throwaway fixtures directly under the workbench's docs/ and lang/vendor/laradocs/<locale>/ — useful for exercising a specific feature (a locale, a version, a front-matter combination) without touching the real docs. Any config/laradocs.php option can be set via the workbench's own .env, exactly as in a consumer app — e.g. LARADOCS_LOCALE_AVAILABLE={"en":"English","fr":"Français"} to test localisation.

For finer control than composer serve gives you — e.g. driving the app with curl instead of a browser — build and serve it yourself:

composer run build              # just (re)build the workbench, don't serve
cd vendor/orchestra/testbench-core/laravel
php artisan config:clear        # pick up .env changes — Laravel may have cached the old config
php artisan serve               # or: php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public public/index.php

Two gotchas worth knowing:

• composer dump-autoload wipes the workbench. The package's post-autoload-dump hook runs testbench package:purge-skeleton, which deletes the generated app — including any .env changes or fixtures you added. Re-run composer run build (or composer serve) afterwards to regenerate it.
• Config changes need config:clear. After editing the workbench's .env, run php artisan config:clear inside it if the change doesn't seem to take effect.

Documentation

The full docs live at laradocs.dev/docs — and are themselves built with Laradocs. Highlights:

• Getting started
• Configuration
• Routing
• Metadata
• Caching
• SEO
• Sitemap
• CLI reference
• PHP API
• Variables · Macros · Rich content
• Customising the UI · Customising stubs
• AI chat · MCP server
• Migration guide: 0.x → 1.0

The source for those pages lives in docs/; browse there or serve a local copy with composer serve.

Sponsors

Laradocs is free and open source. If it saves you time, please consider sponsoring its development — it keeps the project actively maintained.

The image above is regenerated daily by the Scheduler workflow via sponsorkit.

Contributing & Security

See CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.

License

The MIT License (MIT). See LICENSE.md.

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