Can I use the Blade templating engine outside of Laravel?

Matt Stauffer has created a whole repository showing you how you can use various Illuminate components directly outside of Laravel. I would recommend following his example and looking at his source code.

https://github.com/mattstauffer/Torch

Here is the index.php of using Laravel Views outside of Laravel

https://github.com/mattstauffer/Torch/blob/master/components/view/index.php

You can write a custom wrapper around it so that you can call it like Laravel

use Illuminate\Container\Container;
use Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher;
use Illuminate\Filesystem\Filesystem;
use Illuminate\View\Compilers\BladeCompiler;
use Illuminate\View\Engines\CompilerEngine;
use Illuminate\View\Engines\EngineResolver;
use Illuminate\View\Engines\PhpEngine;
use Illuminate\View\Factory;
use Illuminate\View\FileViewFinder;

function view($viewName, $templateData)
{
    // Configuration
    // Note that you can set several directories where your templates are located
    $pathsToTemplates = [__DIR__ . '/templates'];
    $pathToCompiledTemplates = __DIR__ . '/compiled';

    // Dependencies
    $filesystem = new Filesystem;
    $eventDispatcher = new Dispatcher(new Container);

    // Create View Factory capable of rendering PHP and Blade templates
    $viewResolver = new EngineResolver;
    $bladeCompiler = new BladeCompiler($filesystem, $pathToCompiledTemplates);

    $viewResolver->register('blade', function () use ($bladeCompiler) {
        return new CompilerEngine($bladeCompiler);
    });

    $viewResolver->register('php', function () {
        return new PhpEngine;
    });

    $viewFinder = new FileViewFinder($filesystem, $pathsToTemplates);
    $viewFactory = new Factory($viewResolver, $viewFinder, $eventDispatcher);

    // Render template
    return $viewFactory->make($viewName, $templateData)->render();
}

You can then call this using the following

view('view.name', ['title' => 'Title', 'text' => 'This is text']);

For the record:

I tested many libraries to run blade outside Laravel (that i don't use) and most are poor hacks of the original library that simply copied and pasted the code and removed some dependencies yet it retains a lot of dependencies of Laravel.

So I created (for a project) an alternative for blade that its free (MIT license, i.e. close source/private code is OK) in a single file and without a single dependency of an external library. You could download the class and start using it, or you could install via composer.

https://github.com/EFTEC/BladeOne

https://packagist.org/packages/eftec/bladeone

It's 100% compatible without the Laravel's own features (extensions).

How it works:

<?php
include "lib/BladeOne/BladeOne.php";
use eftec\bladeone;

$views = __DIR__ . '/views'; // folder where is located the templates
$compiledFolder = __DIR__ . '/compiled';
$blade=new bladeone\BladeOne($views,$compiledFolder);
echo $blade->run("Test.hello", ["name" => "hola mundo"]);
?>

Another alternative is to use twig but I tested it and I don't like it. I like the syntax of Laravel that its close to ASP.NET MVC Razor.

Edit: To this date (July 2018), it's practically the only template system that supports the new features of Blade 5.6 without Laravel. ;-)

You certainly can, there are lots of standalone blade options on packagist, as long as you are comfortable with composer then there should be no issue, this one looks pretty interesting due to having a really high percentage of stars compared to downloads.

Be warned though i have not tried it myself, like you i was looking for a standalone option for my own project and came across it, i will be giving it a real good workout though at sometime in the near future,