Grease & Inertia

On the server, an Inertia visit is an API request — Grease greases it the same way

Inertia moves rendering to Vue/React on the client, but the server half never changes shape. A controller queries its models, serializes them into props, and returns JSON:

return Inertia::render('Users/Index', [
    'users' => User::with('posts')->get(),
]);

On the PHP side that's query → hydrate → serialize → respond — the exact path the benchmarks and realworld.php already measure on a plain JSON endpoint. Every visit is a fresh request; there's no persistent server-side component state. So the tiers land precisely as they do on an API route:

• Model hydration / casting — the controller queries the models behind the props.
• toArray() + date serialization — Inertia serializes props to JSON through the same path, so a model or resource prop runs the date/cast tiers.
• Container / request / router / events — the request envelope, greased like any route.

There's nothing Inertia-specific to install or configure: the model + serialization tiers are your props, the foundation tiers are the request. Add HasGrease to the models your controllers return and the existing API numbers are your numbers.

The easy case — no snapshot, no checksum

Where Livewire ships a checksummed snapshot of model state between requests — a real place a one-byte serialization drift could break rehydration — Inertia carries no such thing. Props are plain JSON in the response, regenerated from scratch every visit; nothing is HMAC-sealed, no state round-trips through the browser. So there's no byte-identity subtlety to reason about beyond Grease's standing promise that serialized output is byte-identical to vanilla — which every tier already keeps. Partial reloads (only/except) just send a subset of those same props: still a fresh request, fewer props serialized.

(Inertia's SSR renders Vue/React in a Node process — Grease is a PHP package and doesn't touch it. The PHP side still only produces the props JSON, and that's what gets greased.)

Getting started

Add HasGrease to the Eloquent models your controllers pass as props — that's the whole story. The Blade component tier barely applies (Inertia's only Blade is the root app.blade.php rendered once on the first load; every visit after is JSON), but the container, request, router, and event tiers all apply to the request like any other route and compound on top. An Inertia app is an API app wearing a SPA — greasing it is the same work, in the same place.