Enable Bootstrap 4 in Laravel 5.5

Laravel 5.5 just recently got released, and ships with the current stable version of Bootstrap, which is version 3. However, Bootstrap 4 recently hit beta, and should now be solid enough to start development with, especially for new Laravel projects that are just now getting started.

Bootstrap 4 can be easily enabled following these steps. First, remove the Laravel-supplied version of bootstrap-sass from npm:

npm uninstall --save-dev bootstrap-sass

Then install the new version of bootstrap from npm. Tether is no longer used with Bootstrap 4; it was replaced with Popper.js, so let’s go ahead and install the popper.js library too:

npm install --save-dev bootstrap@^4.0.0-beta popper.js

We now have to update our bootstrap.js file with the new requirements. Note that there is some ambiguity with the name of this file, as bootstrap.js is named bootstrap because it is the main file that instantiates JavaScript libraries — it has nothing to do with the Bootstrap library. That said, this is also the same file that is used to instantiate the Bootstrap library ;)

In resources/assets/js/bootstrap.js, replace:

try {
    window.$ = window.jQuery = require('jquery');

    require('bootstrap-sass');
} catch (e) {}

with:

try {
    window.$ = window.jQuery = require('jquery');
    window.Popper = require('popper.js');

    require('bootstrap');
} catch (e) {}

What we are doing here is changing the reference of bootstrap-sass (the old Bootstrap 3 library) with bootstrap (the Bootstrap 4 library). We are also defining the global Popper variable to look at the related NPM library (popper.js).

After a recompilation of assets:

npm run dev

we should now have Bootstrap 4 installed within Laravel 5.5.