Community Laravel Extension for Zed

Laravel for Zed, by Mike Bronner, is a community extension that adds Laravel awareness to the Zed editor. It runs a Language Server Protocol engine that parses your PHP and Blade files with tree-sitter — static analysis only, no application code executed — to drive features like go-to-definition and rename.

Go-to-Definition Across Laravel Conventions

Laravel's string-based references for things like views, routes, and env are resolved so you can command-click from the references to their source and hover for details. At the time of writing, Laravel for Zed supports this for:

Views
Blade components
Routes
Config keys
Translations
Env values
Assets
Middleware
Container bindings
Query-chain columns, relations, and tables

Command-clicking view('welcome') in routes/web.php jumps to welcome.blade.php — Command-clicking `view('welcome')` in `routes/web.php` jumps straight to `resources/views/welcome.blade.php`.

Hover, Find References, and Rename

Hovering a recognized pattern shows an Intelephense-style summary card. Find References locates call sites across the project, including matches inside vendor packages. Rename is atomic: renaming a route, config key, translation, env var, view, component, Livewire reference, middleware, binding, or model class updates every usage in one operation.

Hover card over config('app.name') showing the resolved value from config/services.php — Hovering `config('services')` surfaces a summary card pointing back to `config/services.php`.

Autocomplete and Schema-Aware Diagnostics

Autocomplete covers cast types, model properties, query-chain methods, builder methods, Blade variables, and Pennant flags. Diagnostics flag missing views and components, and check query-chain references against your real database schema to catch typos in column and relation names. When something is missing, Quick Actions offer one-click creation of views, components, middleware, features, and migrations.

Schema-backed autocomplete and diagnostics are optional and read your existing database connection from .env:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_DATABASE=myapp
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=secret

MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and SQL Server are supported.

Blade Editing and the Outline Panel

For Blade templates, the extension adds directive completion, smart bracket expansion, and closing-tag navigation. It also feeds a Laravel-aware view of route and Blade structure into Zed's outline panel and breadcrumbs. To enable LSP-based outlines, turn on document symbols for both languages in settings.json:

{
  "languages": {
    "PHP": {
      "document_symbols": "on"
    },
    "Blade": {
      "document_symbols": "on"
    }
  }
}

Action card showing the missing view — A diagnostic flags `view('welcom')` as missing.

Indexing and Caching

The engine indexes every PHP and Blade file at startup and keeps an on-disk cache, so reopening a project is near-instant and only changed files are re-parsed. External edits from a git pull or formatter run are picked up.

Installation

Search for "Laravel" in the Zed extensions marketplace and click install, or build from source by cloning the repository, running cargo build --release in the laravel-lsp/ directory, and using "zed: install dev extension."

The author recommends pairing it with the Laravel Blade, PHP (Intelephense), phpcs, and phpmd extensions. You can view the source and configuration options on GitHub.