ButterCMS / laravel-starter-buttercms

Drop-in proof-of-concept PHP/Laravel app, fully integrated with your ButterCMS account

Laravel + ButterCMS Starter Project

This Laravel starter project fully integrates with dynamic sample content from your ButterCMS account, including main menu, pages, blog posts, categories, and tags, all with a beautiful, custom theme with already-implemented search functionality. All of the included sample content is automatically created in your account dashboard when you sign up for a free trial of ButterCMS.

You can view a live demo hosted on Heroku, or you can click the button below to deploy your own copy of our starter project to the provider of your choice.

1. Installation

Note: This project requires PHP 8.0.2+ and Composer 2.3.5+. To install/update PHP or Composer, follow the instructions in Troubleshooting, below.

First, clone the repo and install the dependencies

git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/laravel-starter-buttercms
cd laravel-starter-buttercms
composer install

2. Set API Token

To fetch your ButterCMS content, add your API token as an environment variable in .env file.

echo 'LARAVEL_APP_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=<Your API Token>' >> .env

3. Run local server

To view the app in the browser, you'll need to run the local development server:

$ php artisan serve

Congratulations! Your starter project is now live at http://localhost:8000/.

4. Deploy on Heroku

Our starter app can be deployed to Heroku with the click of a button:

1. Create a Heroku account at https://signup.heroku.com.
2. Click the button below and fill in an app name and your Butter API token. Then click "deploy".

5. Previewing Draft Changes

By default, your starter project is set up to allow previewing of draft changes saved in your ButterCMS.com account. To disable this functionality, set the following value in your .env file: LARAVEL_APP_BUTTER_CMS_PREVIEW=false

6. Troubleshooting

In order for this starter project to run properly, you'll want to use PHP 8.0.2 or above and Composer 2.3.5 or above. Using lower versions will result in deprecation errors and warnings, and may prevent Composer from installing or running the project properly.

Installing/Upgrading PHP

Instructions to update your PHP version are provided below; please tailor them to your setup.

sudo apt install software-properties-common && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

Installing/Upgrading Composer

To check your composer version, you can try composer -vv about. If your version is under 2.3.5, you can try the composer self-update command, which should auto-update Composer to the latest version, but this may not work if Composer was installed with a package manager.

To update Composer, follow the official instructions here: https://getcomposer.org/download/. If you installed an older version of Composer with a package manager, it's recommend to use sudo apt remove composer first to prevent version conflicts.