Laravel comes with several utilities that help you perform specific tasks, such as sending e-mails, queuing functions, and manipulating files. It ships with a ton of handy utilities that it uses internally; the good news is that you can also use them in your applications. This chapter will present the most useful utilities so you do not end up rewriting a function that already exists in the framework!

The structure of this chapter is partly based on Jesse O'Brien's cheat sheet, which is accessible at http://cheats.jesse-obrien.ca/. The examples are based on Laravel's tests as well as its official documentation and API.