Passing data to layouts in Blade through extends

15 Jan 2018

Laravel quick tip! The @extends Blade directive accepts a second (undocumented) parameter to pass data to the parent layout.

The docs show this example to render a page title in a layout:

<?php
 
<html>
    <head>
        <title>App Name - @yield('title')</title>
    </head>
</html>

<?php
 
@extends('layouts.app')
 
@section('title', 'Page Title')

This makes it hard to do change or manipulate the page title. A plain variable would make this easier. Suppose we'd want to ensure that our title starts with a capital.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>App Name - {{ ucfirst($title) }}</title>
  </head>
</html>

Now we can't pass our title with @section anymore. Luckily, @extends accepts a second argument, one that lets us pass plain data to the layout.

<?php
 
@extends('layouts.app', ['title' => 'Page Title'])

I also prefer this syntax because title feels more like a property in the layout than a section.

One little caveat, if you forget to pass a title, PHP will throw an error because the variable isn't defined. Make sure you always provide a fallback! PHP's null coalescing operator is pretty good at that.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>App Name - {{ ucfirst($title ?? '') }}</title>
  </head>
</html>