Inertia Static Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Feature scope: Whether to support static route resolution for Inertia apps (e.g., CDN/static hosting, offline demos, backend-independent frontend previews) vs. relying solely on server-side routing.
• Roadmap investment: Prioritizing build-time manifest generation and CI gating for frontend routing; evaluating whether to adopt generated manifests across environments.
• Build vs buy: Deciding whether to use this package’s inertia-static:manifest workflow or maintain a custom manifest generator/Vite plugin.
• Release gating: Enforcing fail-fast production builds (v0.4.0) so a missing static routing manifest cannot silently ship a broken client.
• Developer experience: Standardizing on .gitignore for generated manifests and adding a CI step before vue-tsc/tsc to prevent formatter churn and stale artifacts.
• Operational hygiene: Using inertia-static:doctor as a lightweight guardrail in local and CI workflows.

When to Consider This Package

Consider adoption when:

• You use Laravel + Inertia.js and need a static routing manifest generated at build time.
• You want production Vite builds to fail when php artisan inertia-static:manifest cannot run, rather than shipping a client without static routing.
• Your CI can run PHP/Artisan before frontend type checks or builds.
• You want generated manifests kept out of version control and validated by tooling.
• You are comfortable with a pre-1.0 package where behavior may still change.

Look elsewhere when:

• Your Inertia app relies entirely on server-side routing and does not need static route resolution.
• Your frontend build environment cannot execute PHP or Artisan.
• You need a stable, long-term API with no generated-file or CI workflow requirements.
• You cannot add a manifest generation step to CI or tolerate production builds failing on missing manifests.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: This package reduces the risk of shipping a frontend with broken static routing by making production builds fail fast when the manifest cannot be generated. It adds a small CI step and a doctor command to keep generated files out of source control, improving release reliability with minimal overhead.

For engineering: v0.4.0 strengthens production safety: vite build now fails when inertia-static:manifest cannot run, while vite dev and tests only warn. Treat resources/js/inertia-static.json as generated output—add it to .gitignore and generate it in CI before vue-tsc/tsc. The new inertia-static:doctor command warns when .gitignore does not list the manifest. This is a focused Inertia static-routing package, not a framework replacement; adoption is best when your pipeline can run Artisan before frontend builds.