nova-google-places

A Laravel Nova Field to Autocomplete Addresses with the Google Places API

WHY

The Algolia Places API is being removed soon and the existing nova field implementations of Google's Places Autocomplete do not function in Nova v4. I needed address verification for an app that I was building with Nova 4, so here we are!

NOTE: This is a WIP!

...and potentially not suitable for production. I created this primarily to meet my own need, but I welcome pull requests and improvements.

Installation

I honestly expect the Nova team will come out with a first-party Algolia replacement before long, so this repo is not available on packagist for now. In the meantime, you can bring this into composer directly from git with a quick edit to your composer.json file.

"repositories": [
        {
            "type": "composer",
            "url": "https://nova.laravel.com"
        },
        {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "https://github.com/mknooihuisen/nova-google-places"
        }
],
"require": {
  "laravel/nova": "~4.0",
  "mknooihuisen/nova-google-places": "dev-main",
  ...
}

Then create yourself a (free) Google Cloud project and generate API Credentials. This package uses vue-google-autocomplete behind the scenes, and so it shares their API dependencies.

The API's that you have to enable in your Google API Manager Dashboard are Google Maps Geocoding API, Google Places API Web Service and Google Maps Javascript API.

You do need to have a card on file with google to use these APIs, but as of 04/2022, Google offers free monthly API credit that should cover most small to medium business use cases.

Then add the key to your environment file. The field's service provider will throw an exception if this is missing.

ADDRESS_AUTOCOMPLETE_API_KEY=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Usage

Usage is very simple right now, though I may add more features down the road. Let's say you wanted your User model to have an optional address...

First, make an appropriate migration

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->json('home_address')->nullable(); //named as you like, of course.
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->dropColumn('home_address');
        });
    }
};

next make sure your User model knows how to handle it.

namespace App\Models;

protected $fillable = [
        ...
        'home_address',
        ...
];

protected $casts = [
        ...
        'home_address' => 'json',
        ...
];

and finally, make use of it in your Nova User Resource!

use use Mknooihuisen\GooglePlaces\GooglePlaces;

class User extends Resource {
        
        ...
        public function fields(NovaRequest $request) {
                return [
                        ...
                        GooglePlaces::make("Home Address", 'home_address');
                        ...
                ];
        }
}

Todo:

If this winds up being a permanent package, there are a number of enhancements I want to make:

• Currently the field only handles US addresses well, this should be customizable.
• Localization options for non-English speakers
• Ability to edit the field without expanding the address into it's components first.

Also, there are many caases when we might want more than one address per record. Vacation homes, business addresses, etc. One option might be graduating this to a full installable Model and Trait combo, to make adding addresses wherever needed easy.