Controllers

Overview

Statamic is a package sitting inside a standard Laravel application, giving you the freedom to create your own routes, map them to controllers, and build your own custom application and business logic outside of Statamic's feature set.

Anything you can do in Laravel you can do here. Because you're using Laravel. You just also have access to all of Statamic's capabilities and features.

Routes

Routes are defined in routes/web.php.

For example, you can map a GET request to yoursite.com/example to the index method in the app\Http\Controllers\ExampleController.php file like this:

use App\Http\Controllers\ExampleController;
 
Route::get('example', [ExampleController::class, 'index']);

Basic Controller

In your controller, render views like you would in a regular Laravel app:

<?php
 
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
 
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
 
class ExampleController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $data = [
            'title' => 'Example Title'
        ];
 
        return view('myview', $data);  // resources/views/myview.blade.php
    }
}

php artisan make:controller ExampleController

Antlers Views

Returning view('myview') will render the myview.antlers.html view. To take advantage of Statamic's standard template-injected-into-a-layout behavior, return a Statamic\View\View instance instead of a regular Laravel one.

public function index()
{
    return (new \Statamic\View\View)
        ->template('myview')
        ->layout('mylayout')
        ->with(['title' => 'Example Title']);
}

Now, myview will be injected into mylayout's template_content variable.
Anything provided to with (eg. title) will be available in both views.

If you want to make an entry's content available in your view, you can use the cascadeContent method:

// app/Http/Controllers/MySpecialController.php
 
public function index()
{
    $entry = Entry::whereCollection('pages')
        ->where('slug', 'special-page')
        ->where('published', true)
        ->first();
 
    return (new \Statamic\View\View)
        ->template('myview')
        ->layout('mylayout')
        ->cascadeContent($entry);
}

Related Reading

• Laravel Controllers
• Laravel Routes
• Antlers