Serve CSS and JS from outside of public folder in Laravel 5

Question

I understand this sort of breaks the structured point of Laravel, but there is method to my madness. I plan on using a single install of laravel to host several websites that are database driven. At the moment all of the sites share the same layout and I have a system to store some custom CSS in the DB to give each site a different color scheme. I want to change this so they can use completely different views. So site A loads views/theme1/app.blade.php and site B loads views/theme2/app.blade.php.

I have implemented this by using the following to return a view.

$theme = getDomainThemeName();
return view($theme.'/home');

This is also working, but i am now left with the task of dynamically loading the assets. I am using bootstrap the generate the themes and making a few tweaks to the HTML to create the app.blade.php file. I have 2 potential solutions to this but i would much rather a way to server the css files from the views directory. This means the following mapping.

http://website.com/css/style.css => /resources/views/theme1/css/style.css

Can something like this be done? Another option would be to use php to read the css file and insert it into the app using a yield. It works, but it means i cant use browser caching to cache the assets. I was also thinking i could just create sub directories in the public folder. public/theme1/css/style.css. This makes the most logical sense, but it means i have to fragment the theme system. Id like to be able to unzip a theme in the views directory and it just works.

I am using Laravel 5, i have root access to the server too. Running PHP 5.4 on centos 7.

vpedrosa · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-18 11:15:26Z

0

I think the best approach is having next structure:

/public/css/style.css
/public/css/theme1/custom1.css
/resources/views/common.blade.php
/resources/views/theme1/main.blade.php

And then loading conditionally with php each site theme. It may not be any trouble with caching.

answered Nov 18, 2015 at 11:15

vpedrosa

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2 Comments

Dan Hastings Over a year ago

I agree this is the best solution all around, but i wanted to have a wordpress style theme system. Unzip a folder and it just works. With this there will need to be 2 folders setup. I could setup an "install" system that will copy the assets from the view folder if they dont exist in the public directory. I was just hoping to have something like wordpress does.

vpedrosa Over a year ago

You can use Elixir then. If you use SASS/SCSS or LESS instead of CSS, you can call a elixir(function(mix) { ... }) to get it working, because it's stored under /resources/assets/sass for example, so you can just drop a zip folder in /resources/ and call Elixir. All docs are here: Elixir Laravel 5.1 Official documentation

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