Netbeans - Adding Support for Laravel

When I first found out about Laravel, I was super excited about this new (at the time) framework, especially because there were all these lovely video tutorials (Laracasts) to learn from. However, I was quickly disappointed due to lack of auto completion and hinting in Netbeans. I just gave up thinking that the framework was for those willing to pay out for PhpStorm.

Luckily, there is a way around this, and you can get auto-complete/hinting in Netbeans as shown in the image below (where I am editing the web routes file).

The Solution

The solution is to download a "helper file" inside your Laravel project, which will provide the information Netbeans needs. Run the following command from inside your project in order to download this helper file.

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/barryvdh/5227822/raw/4be028a27c4ec782965bb8f2fdcb4c08c71a441d/_ide_helper.php

If this tutorial becomes out of date, and that file no longer works, I grabbed it from the Laravel 5 IDE Helper Generator Github repository, which will probably have info on what to do.

Installing Laravel

Just a reminder; if you are setting up a laravel project, you can create it with the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-project-name-goes-here --prefer-dist

Netbeans users, don't forget to run this step to enable auto[complete etc.

Adding To .gitignore

If you are a git user, you may wish to add it to your .gitignore, but then again maybe others could benefit from having it.

echo "_ide_helper.php" >> .gitignore

References

• Laracasts - Episode 15
• Github - barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper
• Github Gist - barryvdh/_ide_helper.php
• Youtube - Learning Laravel 5.2 Series- NetBeans IDE and Important Plugins for Laravel Development video - 3