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Laravel Menus Laravel Package
rinvex/laravel-menus
Rinvex Laravel Menus is a fluent, database-backed menu builder for Laravel. Create nested, sortable menus with route links, authorization checks, and Blade rendering helpers for flexible navigation.
Rinvex Menus is a simple menu builder package for Laravel, that supports hierarchical structure, ordering, and styling with full flexibility using presenters for easy styling and custom structure of menu rendering.
Frequently asked questions about Laravel Menus
- How do I install rinvex/laravel-menus in a Laravel application?
- Install it with Composer using composer require rinvex/laravel-menus, then publish the package config and migrations with the vendor:publish command tagged for the package. Run php artisan migrate to create the menus and menu_items tables. The package registers its service provider and a facade automatically, so you can start creating menus and rendering them in Blade once the schema exists.
- Which Laravel and PHP versions does rinvex/laravel-menus support?
- Support depends on the version constraints declared in the package composer.json, which you should check before committing to it. The package is most comfortably at home in an existing Laravel 8 to 10 monolith with a Blade-rendered front end. On a current Laravel 11 or 12 greenfield project, expect to either pin shared dependencies back or patch and fork the package yourself. Always build a small compatibility proof of concept against your target framework version first.
- How do I render a menu in a Blade template with rinvex/laravel-menus?
- You render a menu by resolving it through the facade and handing it to your layout, typically inside a Blade partial that wraps the site header or footer. The package converts the stored menu tree into HTML through its presenter layer, so the markup is generated for you rather than hand-written per item. Keep the render call in a single partial so you can swap the presenter or cache the output later without touching every template.
- How do I build nested or hierarchical menus and control item ordering?
- Menus and menu items are Eloquent models, so nesting is expressed as parent-child relationships and ordering as a sort column on each item. You build the tree by assigning parents and positions when creating items, either at seed time or through your own CRUD screens. Because reordering writes multiple rows, wrap drag-and-drop or bulk sort updates in a database transaction to avoid corrupting the hierarchy during concurrent edits. Menu rendering is also a query per menu, so cache the rendered output if the same navigation appears on every request.
- Does rinvex/laravel-menus support route links, active states, and authorization checks?
- Yes. Menu items can point at named routes or URLs, and items can be hidden based on authorization checks so navigation reflects what the current user is allowed to reach. Active-state detection lets the presenter mark the item matching the current request. The exact helper names and option flags are worth verifying against the source for your installed version, since the API descends from the older Cartalyst menu lineage.
- How do I customize the HTML markup that a menu renders?
- Customization is done through presenters, which are plain PHP classes responsible for turning a menu tree into markup. You can subclass or write your own presenter to emit exactly the classes, ARIA attributes, and nesting structure your design system expects. The tradeoff is ownership: a custom presenter becomes first-party code your team maintains, so treat it like any other application class. A useful migration tactic is to build a presenter that reproduces your existing hardcoded navigation markup pixel for pixel before switching the data source.
- Is there a built-in admin UI for managing menus?
- No. The package gives you the models, migrations, and rendering layer, but you build the CRUD interface yourself. In practice that means a Filament or Nova resource, or a small custom controller, over the menus and menu_items tables. Factor that build cost into your estimate, because a database-driven menu only pays off when a non-developer actually has a screen to edit it.
- How does rinvex/laravel-menus compare to spatie/laravel-menu?
- Both solve the same problem of building navigations in Laravel, but spatie/laravel-menu is largely code-driven with far wider adoption, while rinvex/laravel-menus is database-backed and aimed at runtime-editable navigation. Choose rinvex when navigation genuinely must change without a deploy and you want the tree stored in the database. Choose spatie, or even a simple config file, when navigation is code reviewed in a pull request like the rest of your application.
- Is rinvex/laravel-menus actively maintained and safe to use in production?
- Treat stewardship as the primary risk rather than code quality. The package has a small star count, a single-maintainer lineage, and low market adoption, even though its logic descends from the reasonably battle-tested Cartalyst menu code. Before adopting it, check the commit history and open issues to see whether the repository is receiving updates or is effectively archived. Also plan an exit cost: because rendering is isolated in a presenter, you can usually swap in another package or a hand-rolled renderer without rewriting templates.
- Will rinvex/laravel-menus cause Composer conflicts with rinvex/laravel-support or other packages?
- Possibly. Like other Rinvex packages it depends on rinvex/laravel-support, and those sibling version pins are the usual source of dependency resolution failures on newer framework releases. Run a composer require in a throwaway branch before anything else and inspect what it forces onto shared packages. If it demands pins you cannot accept, that is your signal to evaluate an alternative rather than to fight the resolver.
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