Ink Laravel Package

title: MediaLibrary Integration description: Opt-in featured-image upload via spatie/laravel-medialibrary. navigation: icon: i-lucide-image

The package ships an opt-in integration with spatie/laravel-medialibrary. When enabled, the featured-image upload uses SpatieMediaLibraryFileUpload instead of the default FileUpload.

::alert{type="info"} MediaLibrary is not a hard dependency. If you don't install it, the form gracefully falls back to the plain FileUpload — no crash. Flipping features.media_library without installing MediaLibrary is a no-op. ::

Enable

1. Install the package:

   composer require spatie/laravel-medialibrary
   php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\MediaLibrary\MediaLibraryServiceProvider" --tag="medialibrary-migrations"
   php artisan migrate
   

2. Flip the flag:

   'features' => [
       'media_library' => true,
   ],
   

3. Use the form as usual — the featured-image field now writes to the MediaLibrary media table on a featured_image collection.

Form-side only (for now)

This integration covers the admin form-component swap only. The model-side integration (implementing HasMedia, registering collections via registerMediaCollections(), migrating existing featured_image string column data) is intentionally deferred — that requires careful schema-migration design that doesn't fit a feature-flag layer.

If you want the full integration today, override the Post model in your app:

namespace App\Models;

use Relaticle\Ink\Models\Post as BasePost;
use Spatie\MediaLibrary\HasMedia;
use Spatie\MediaLibrary\InteractsWithMedia;
use Spatie\MediaLibrary\MediaCollections\Models\Collections\MediaCollection;

class BlogPost extends BasePost implements HasMedia
{
    use InteractsWithMedia;

    public function registerMediaCollections(): void
    {
        $this->addMediaCollection('featured_image')->singleFile();
    }
}

Then point the package at your model:

// (post_model is not currently a config key — track this in
// Phase 3 follow-up; for now the package always uses its own Post)

::alert{type="warning"} Swapping the post model isn't a config option in v1.4 — that lands in Phase 3 along with the model-side integration. Watch the GitHub releases for v1.5. ::

Migrating existing featured_image data

When Phase 3 lands, existing posts with a featured_image string path will be migrated to MediaLibrary entries via a console command. Until then, two options:

1. Stay on FileUpload — leave the flag off. No migration required.
2. Manual migration — write your own script to copy featured_image files into MediaLibrary on a featured_image collection.

Both Tapix and FilaForms blogs (which this package replaces) use the same string-column approach, so flipping the flag without migration leaves you in a usable state — new posts go to MediaLibrary, old posts keep using the string path. The shipped views render whichever exists.