🗂️ Filament File Explorer

Live updates

Nothing is broadcast, so two people browsing the same root see nothing of each other’s uploads, renames and deletions until they navigate. refresh.seconds closes that gap:

// config/filament-file-explorer.php
'refresh' => ['seconds' => 20],

FilamentFileExplorerPlugin::make()->refreshEvery(20)

Off by default, and floored at five seconds.

What it stands down for

The polling is driven from Alpine rather than wire:poll, which is what lets it decide not to fire. It skips a refresh while:

  • the tab is hidden,
  • an item is being dragged — a morphed DOM cancels a drag in progress,
  • the user is renaming, creating a folder or uploading,
  • a dialog is open.

A “Load more” survives a refresh: the window stays as wide as the user made it, rather than snapping back to the first page.

What it actually adds

Most freshness is free. Livewire re-reads its models on every request and the listing is queried on every render, so anything that causes a round trip already shows the current tree.

What the refresh adds is the case nothing else covers: the folder you are standing in has been deleted or moved out of scope by someone else. The explorer falls back to the root rather than rendering a folder that is no longer there.

One known gap. With the trash off, a folder purged under you leaves Livewire unable to restore the model at all, and the page has to be reloaded. Soft-deleted folders — which is what the trash produces, and it is on by default — restore fine and take the fallback above.

Explorers on the same page

A mutation also announces itself to the other explorers on the page, which is what keeps a picker in a modal in step with the page behind it.

The announcement carries the component id, so a component ignores its own event — and it is never dispatched from a refresh, which is what stops two explorers refreshing each other forever.

If you do want broadcasting

There is no hook for it and none is needed: every mutation fires an event, so broadcasting is a listener of yours rather than a feature of the package.

Event::listen(FileExplorerEvent::class, function (FileExplorerEvent $event): void {
    broadcast(new LibraryChanged($event->scopeKey));
});

The scope key is on every event precisely so a listener can address the right audience.