Laravel and Inertia with React and TypeScript

Create a fresh Laravel project.

laravel new inertia-typescript

Back-End

Let's setup back-end for Inertia.js by following instructions from here.

composer require inertiajs/inertia-laravel

Create Root template at resources/views/app.blade.php with following contents:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0" />
    <link href="{{ mix('/css/app.css') }}" rel="stylesheet" />
    <script src="{{ mix('/js/app.js') }}" defer></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    @inertia
  </body>
</html>

Create a route in routes/web.php

use Inertia\Inertia;

Route::get('home', function(){
  return Inertia::render('Home');
});

Note: We haven't yet created Home component specified inside render method.

Front-End

Let's set up our front-end by following instructions from here.

We'll start with bunch of installations:

npm install react react-dom @types/react

npm install @inertiajs/inertia @inertiajs/inertia-react

npm install --save-dev ts-loader typescript

Initialize typescript by creating tsconfig.json file using below command:

tsc --init --jsx react

Initialize our Inertia app like below inside resources/js/app.js:

import { InertiaApp } from '@inertiajs/inertia-react'
import React from 'react'
import { render } from 'react-dom'

const app = document.getElementById('app')

render(
  <InertiaApp
    initialPage={JSON.parse(app.dataset.page)}
    resolveComponent={name => import(`./Pages/${name}`).then(module => module.default)}
  />,
  app
)

Create our Home component at resources/js/Pages/Home.tsx

import React from "react";

const Home = () => {
    let foo: string = "React";
    const bar: string = "TypeScript";

    return (
        <h1>
            Hello {foo} + {bar}
        </h1>
    );
};

export default Home;

Notice that I have .tsx extension instead of .jsx

Change mix.js to mix.ts in webpack.mix.js file:

mix.ts('resources/js/app.js', 'public/js')
    .postCss('resources/css/app.css', 'public/css', [
        //
    ]);

Next, npm run dev
Read Update below 👇🏼

🔴 You will face an error here inside your resources/js/app.js file because we have written some JSX syntax to initialize our app but we haven't installed react-preset so that Babel can understand it.

Lets install @babel/preset-react as dev dependency.

npm install --save-dev @babel/preset-react

Create a .babelrc file at root of our project with following contents:

{
  "presets": ["@babel/preset-react"]
}

Run npm run dev again and you should be able to compile your assets now. Visit the /home route to verify that you are able to see the output in browser.

Disclaimer: This is not the definitive guide on setting up TypeScript with React for Laravel and Inertia. This is just how I am proceeding with this setup.

If you find any mistakes, or know a better approach please leave your feedback in comments below 🙏🏼

Demo source code can be found here.

Update

Amitav Roy mentioned on Twitter if we can completely ditch JavaScript and also be able to avoid @babel/preset-react step above. Turns out it can be done easily.
Commit from Demo repository that shows how it can be done: 49be431

Blog

Laravel and Inertia with React and TypeScript

Zubair Mohsin

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