Laravel Metric Cards Laravel Package

DO NOT USE YET

Work in progress

Assets

The package ships a pre-built, standalone browser bundle (dist/metrics.js) that already includes Chart.js (incl. the Colors plugin). Host applications do not need to install or import Chart.js themselves.

dist/metrics.js is committed to the repository and therefore part of every release tag. When you change the source in resources/js/metrics.js you must rebuild and commit the bundle:

npm ci
npm run build
git add dist/metrics.js

CI verifies via git diff --exit-code dist/metrics.js that the committed bundle matches the source. Releases are only created when the bundle is up to date.

Asset publishing

Publish the bundle to your application's public directory:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-metrics-assets

The metric views automatically include the script exactly once per page, even when several metrics are rendered.

Config publishing

Publish the package configuration:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-metric-cards-config

This creates config/metric-cards.php.

Chart colors

Host applications can control the Chart.js colors entirely through config/metric-cards.php — without editing or rebuilding dist/metrics.js:

'chart' => [
    // Chart.js global fallback colors (Chart.defaults.*).
    'defaults' => [
        'background_color' => '#6c5cff',
        'border_color' => '#6c5cff',
        'font_color' => '#111827',
    ],

    // How colors are derived once the palette is exhausted:
    // 'hue' (default), 'lightness' or 'repeat'.
    'color_derivation' => 'hue',

    // Package palette used for pie segments and multiple trend datasets.
    'dataset_colors' => [
        '#6c5cff',
        '#00c2a8',
        '#f59e0b',
        '#ef4444',
    ],

    // Chart.js "Colors" plugin configuration.
    'colors_plugin' => [
        'enabled' => true,
        'force_override' => false,
    ],
],

• defaults — the global Chart.js fallback colors (Chart.defaults.backgroundColor, Chart.defaults.borderColor, Chart.defaults.color).

• dataset_colors — the package palette used for pie segments and for multiple trend datasets. A metric may override it for its own card by filling the $colors array on the Pie metric; left empty (the default) it follows this palette.

• color_derivation — how a chart colors segments once the palette is exhausted. The number of pie segments usually comes from data, so a palette can always be too short. The palette itself is never touched: the first segments of a chart are the palette in its configured order, derivation only starts afterwards.

  • hue (default) rotates the hue by the golden angle per palette run — the widest separation, at the price of leaving the color family. Greys, black and white have no hue to rotate, so those are varied by brightness instead.
  • lightness keeps the hue and varies the brightness — stays inside the color family, distinguishes less clearly, and because brightness is bounded a heavily recycled palette eventually repeats.
  • repeat cycles the palette unchanged.

  A single metric can deviate by setting protected ?ColorDerivation $colorDerivation.

  Derivation only understands hex colors (#rgb, #rgba, #rrggbb, #rrggbbaa; transparency is preserved). A palette of rgb(), hsl() or CSS variables is cycled unchanged — those colors repeat once the palette is exhausted. Use hex values in the palette if a chart may have more segments than the palette has colors.

  An empty palette falls back to the package's built-in one, so legend and canvas always agree on a color.

• colors_plugin — configuration for the Chart.js Colors plugin. With force_override = false (default) the plugin does not overwrite colors that the package already set on a dataset.

These settings are passed from PHP to JavaScript via window.LaravelMetrics.config in the package's _assets.blade.php view. The Laravel config is the primary override source; any window.LaravelMetrics.config set manually before the bundle loads only complements it.

Upgrading pie metrics

Two breaking changes come with the per-segment color resolution:

• The pie view renders $segmentColors instead of $colors. A published or overridden copy of the old view has to be re-published, otherwise it reads $colors, which is now the (possibly empty) palette rather than one color per segment.
• Pie::$colors no longer carries hard-coded colors, so pie charts follow dataset_colors like every other chart. A metric that wants its own palette still declares public array $colors = [...].