CakePHP Interact

Overview ​

CakePHP Interact adds interactive PHP regions to CakePHP pages. An island renders HTML and handles subsequent actions without reloading the surrounding page.

A PHP class declares its state and actions. CakePHP templates produce the HTML; Alpine handles browser interactions. Interact is independent of Livewire and htmx.

Features ​

  • Input binding, live search, conditional fields, and URL-bound state.
  • PHP actions, entity validation, explicit saving, redirects, and native downloads.
  • Independent nested islands and browser events.
  • Lazy and deferred loading, polling, and temporary file uploads.
  • Alpine integration and third-party JavaScript widgets.

Start with Installation and Quickstart. Examples contains complete applications. Use the documentation's feature and API pages for syntax, defaults, and behavior.

Application responsibilities ​

Use Table finders for queries and CakePHP validation, application rules, and services for persistence. Current authorization and CSRF middleware apply to updates. Synchronization does not save automatically.

Keep browser-only UI state in Alpine. Put interactive PHP values in declared properties; entities, queries, and services remain on the server.

Status and compatibility ​

Interact targets PHP 8.5 and CakePHP 6 development builds. It is available as dev-main; there is no stable release. The API is experimental.

Enhanced navigation, entity transport, and form-plugin adapters are not implemented. Normal links continue to use CakePHP navigation.