Serving static HTML with Laravel

Yes, Laravel can be used to serve static HTML files. To achieve the desired functionality of resolving paths to HTML files, loading the markup into PHP's DOMDocument, stripping the header and footer, and appending a new header and footer, the following steps can be taken:

1. Create a route that accepts a path parameter, which represents the path to the HTML file.
2. Use the file_get_contents function to read the contents of the HTML file.
3. Load the contents into PHP's DOMDocument using the loadHTML method.
4. Use the getElementsByTagName method to select the header and footer elements and remove them from the DOMDocument.
5. Append the new header and footer to the DOMDocument using the createElement and appendChild methods.
6. Use the saveHTML method to get the updated HTML markup.
7. Cache the updated HTML markup using Laravel's caching system.

To generate 'section' views that show paginated lists of pages within a particular subdirectory, a recursive query can be used to dig into the filesystem tree. The results of the query can be cached to improve performance.

To recursively index the pages for search, Laravel's Scout package can be used. Scout provides a simple solution for adding full-text search to Eloquent models. It supports multiple search engines, including Algolia, Elasticsearch, and Meilisearch.

Here's an example implementation of the above steps:

Route::get('/{path}', function ($path) {
    $filePath = storage_path('app/public/' . $path);

    if (!file_exists($filePath)) {
        abort(404);
    }

    $html = file_get_contents($filePath);
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML($html);

    // Remove header and footer
    $header = $dom->getElementsByTagName('header')->item(0);
    $footer = $dom->getElementsByTagName('footer')->item(0);
    $header->parentNode->removeChild($header);
    $footer->parentNode->removeChild($footer);

    // Append new header and footer
    $newHeader = $dom->createElement('header', 'New Header');
    $newFooter = $dom->createElement('footer', 'New Footer');
    $dom->documentElement->insertBefore($newHeader, $dom->documentElement->firstChild);
    $dom->documentElement->appendChild($newFooter);

    $updatedHtml = $dom->saveHTML();

    // Cache the updated HTML markup
    Cache::put($path, $updatedHtml, 60);

    return $updatedHtml;
});