A free map field for Backpack, from the community: siberfx/backpack-leafletjs

I just found out about siberfx/backpack-leafletjs and I think more of you should know about it. It's a map field for Backpack, built on...

I just found out about siberfx/backpack-leafletjs and I think more of you should know about it.

It's a map field for Backpack, built on Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. Click the map, drag the marker or search an address, and it stores the latitude and longitude in your lat and lng columns. No API key, no account, nothing to pay for. Add a Mapbox token to your .env and it switches to Mapbox tiles. It also ships an <x-leaflet-frontend> Blade component, so you can show the same map with markers on your public pages.

composer require siberfx/backpack-leafletjs

CRUD::field([
    'name' => 'lat,lng',
    'label' => 'Location',
    'type' => 'leaflet',
]);

That's the whole setup. It works with multiple maps per form, inside tabs and inside modals. It supports Backpack 6.8 and 7, Laravel 12 and 13, and PHP 8.2 to 8.5. Older stacks can use the 6.x releases.

Now, the honest part. The package has 24 downloads on Packagist. Twenty-four. I'd normally hesitate to point people at a package with numbers like that. I'm not hesitating here, for two reasons.

First, the author. Selim Görmüş has been around the Backpack community for years, and the people who've worked with him know he does good work. Second, the history. The first release went out in February 2023, and the latest one went out this month, with tests, CI and a changelog. It's a niche package, so few people need it. But the people who need it have had a maintained package for three and a half years. That's more than most packages with a thousand downloads can say.

If you need a map field and you don't want to pay for Google Maps, this is what I'd use. We've added it to our add-ons page. It's a community package, so questions and bugs go to Selim's repo, not our support.

Thank you, Selim. Keep going.