When building a web application, you'll often need to add a feature that allows users to upload files. For example, you might want to allow users to update their profile pictures or share files with each other.

In this article, we're going to take a look at how to use a JavaScript library called "FilePond" to upload files in your Laravel applications. We'll also briefly discuss alternative approaches to file uploads in Laravel. We'll then take a look at how you can use FilePond to upload multiple files at once and upload images (with an image preview). Finally, we'll then look at how you can validate your uploaded files, how to delete temporary files, and how to write tests for your file uploading code.

What is FilePond?

FilePond is a JavaScript library that allows you to upload files in your web applications.

It provides a simple, accessible, and visually-appealing interface for uploading files. It can give you a great starting point for building your own file upload functionality without needing to worry too much about the styling and accessibility of the interface.

FilePond allows you to upload synchronously or asynchronously. This means that you can either upload the files in a single request at the time of submitting the form (synchronous), or you can upload the files in separate requests before you submit the form (asynchronous). Using the asynchronous approach can typically provide a better user experience as users can continue to fill out other fields in the form while the files are being uploaded. For the purpose of this article, we're going to focus on the asynchronous approach.

There are also a number of plugins that you can use with FilePond to add additional functionality. For example, you can use the FilePondPluginImagePreview plugin to show a preview of the image that's being uploaded. In fact, we'll be taking a look at this plugin later in this article.

FilePond also provides the ability to upload files in chunks. This is useful if you want to upload larger files that may be too large to upload in a single request. However, for the sake of this tutorial, we'll only be looking at uploading files in a single request. If you'd like more information on how to upload files in chunks, you can check out the FilePond documentation.