Book Image

Laravel Application Development Cookbook

By : Terry Matula
Book Image

Laravel Application Development Cookbook

By: Terry Matula

Overview of this book

When creating a web application, there are many PHP frameworks from which to choose. Some are very easy to set up, and some have a much steeper learning curve. Laravel offers both paths. You can do a quick installation and have your app up-and-running in no time, or you can use Laravel's extensibility to create an advanced and fully-featured app.Laravel Application Development Cookbook provides you with working code examples for many of the common problems that web developers face. In the process, it will also allow both new and existing Laravel users to expand their knowledge of the framework.This book will walk you through all aspects of Laravel development. It begins with basic set up and installation procedures, and continues through more advanced use cases. You will also learn about all the helpful features that Laravel provides to make your development quick and easy. For more advanced needs, you will also see how to utilize Laravel's authentication features and how to create a RESTful API.In the Laravel Application Development Cookbook, you will learn everything you need to know about a great PHP framework, with working code that will get you up-and-running in no time.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Laravel Application Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using Autoloader to map a class name to its file


Using Laravel's ClassLoader, we can easily include any of our custom class libraries in our code and have them readily available.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need to set up a standard Laravel installation.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

  1. In the Laravel /app directory, create a new directory named custom, which will hold our custom classes.

  2. In the custom directory, create a file named MyShapes.php and add this simple code:

    <?php
    class MyShapes {
        public function octagon() 
        {
            return 'I am an octagon';
        }
    }
  3. In the /app/start directory, open global.php and update ClassLoader so it looks like this:

    ClassLoader::addDirectories(array(
    
        app_path().'/commands',
        app_path().'/controllers',
        app_path().'/models',
        app_path().'/database/seeds',
        app_path().'/custom',
    
    ));
  4. Now we can use that class in any part of our application. For example, if we create a route:

    Route::get('shape', function()
    {
        $shape = new MyShapes;
        return $shape->octagon();
    });

How it works...

Most of the time, we will use Composer to add packages and libraries to our app. However, there may be libraries that aren't available through Composer or custom libraries that we want to keep separate. To accomplish this, we need to dedicate a spot to hold our class libraries; in this case, we create a directory named custom and put it in our app directory.

Then we add our class files, making sure the class names and filenames are the same. This could either be classes we create ourselves or maybe even a legacy class that we need to use.

Finally, we add the directory to Laravel's ClassLoader. When that's complete, we'll be able to use those classes anywhere in our application.

See also

  • The Creating advanced Autoloaders with namespaces and directories recipe