How to Install into an Existing Laravel Application

Statamic can be installed into an existing Laravel application and used to add new sections — like a blog or press release section — function as a headless CMS, or even manage existing data.

Overview

There are many reasons why you might want to install Statamic into an existing Laravel application. You could use Statamic to:

handle all the marketing and "logged out" content for a SaaS app
add an easy-to-manage blog the whole team can update
manage existing data kinda like Laravel Nova (yes, you can do that)
run as a headless CMS and provide a REST API to your data
be a special comfort package for those tough projects even when you don't need it

Hot Tip!

If you're starting a brand new project, it's much easier to use the standard Statamic installation method.

You'll get a bunch of things automatically set up for you, like a pages collection, views, etc. If you install Statamic into Laravel, you're going to have to do those things manually.

Supported Versions of Laravel

Laravel 10, 11 and 12 are supported with Statamic 5. If you need Laravel 9 support, you can still use Statamic 4.x.

Install Statamic

There are 3 steps to follow to install Statamic into your Laravel app.

Run php artisan config:clear to make sure your config isn't cached.

In composer.json, add the following items:

"scripts": { 
    "pre-update-cmd": [ 
        "Statamic\\Console\\Composer\\Scripts::preUpdateCmd" 
    ],  
    "post-autoload-dump": [ 
        "Illuminate\\Foundation\\ComposerScripts::postAutoloadDump",
        "@php artisan package:discover --ansi",
        "@php artisan statamic:install --ansi" 
    ], 
}

Install statamic/cms with Composer.

composer require statamic/cms --with-dependencies

Depending on how you set up users in your app, you might need to run a command to publish Statamic's auth migrations.
```
php please auth:migration
```

Adding Content

When you install Statamic into Laravel this way, no content or views are included.

You'll probably want to create a collection and some entries, as well as views and a layout in order to see things appear on the front-end of your site.

Pages

A common "catch-all" content scenario is to create a Pages collection which allows you to create a home page as well as any other pages in a tree structure. You get this when you install Statamic from scratch, but it's easy to set up yourself.

The easiest way is to copy the pages.yaml file and the pages directory from the statamic/statamic repository.

Or, if you wanted to do it through the Control Panel:

Create a collection named pages.
- Set the route to {parent_uri}/{slug}
- Enable the "Orderable" toggle
- Enabled the "Expect a root page" toggle
Create an entry. The first one will be your home page.

Views

Statamic routed URLs will expect views named default and layout. You will need to add those manually too.

Database

Content

When you install Statamic into an existing Laravel application, content will be stored as flat files.

If you'd prefer to store content in a database instead, please follow the "Storing Content in a Database" guide.

Users

If you want to continue to keep users in a database, head over to Storing Users in a Database in an Existing Laravel App and follow those steps.

Otherwise, the Storing User Records page should have instructions for the most common scenarios.

New Statamic Directories

After Statamic is installed, you'll have 3 new directories in your project:

content/,
resources/users/
config/statamic/