What is an easy and clean way to access vendor files from a Laravel 5 view

Question

I've installed bootstrap-calendar (using bower) to my Laravel 5 project. Bootstrap-calendar got installed into my laravel/vendor/bootstrap-calendar/ folder.

To use bootstrap-calendar, I need to reference CSS/JS files in my views, from:

laravel/vendor/bootstrap-calendar/css
laravel/vendor/bootstrap-calendar/js

Is there an easy and clean way to use these files in my project without having to copy them to the public folder?

Answer 1

You can use Laravel Mix (known as Laravel Elixir on Laravel <= 5.3) to perform this and other functions on your app's assets.

Laravel >= 5.4:

mix.copy('vendor/bootstrap-calendar/css', 'public/bootstrap-calendar/css');
mix.copy('vendor/bootstrap-calendar/js', 'public/bootstrap-calendar/js');

Laravel <= 5.3:

elixir(function(mix) {
    mix.copy('vendor/bootstrap-calendar/css', 'public/bootstrap-calendar/css');
    mix.copy('vendor/bootstrap-calendar/js', 'public/bootstrap-calendar/js');
});