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

#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.

#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"
    }
  }
}

#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.