Automatic Route Discovery in Laravel

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Automatic Route Discovery in Laravel image

Laravel Route Discovery is a package by Spatie to discover routes in Laravel applications automatically. You can configure where routes can be "discoverable" either in a routes file or via configuration:

// in a routes file
use Spatie\RouteDiscovery\Discovery\Discover;
 
Discover::controllers()->in(app_path('Http/Controllers'));

Once you define the controller path, this package will generate the route URL based on controller and method names in that path. For example, if you wanted a news controller, you might define the following:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
 
class NewsController
{
// The route would be `/news`
public function index() { /* ... */ }
 
// The route would be `/news/my-method`
public function myMethod() { /* ... */ }
 
// The route would be `/news/my-other-method`
public function myOtherMethod() { /* ... */ }
}

While the above example demonstrates GET requests, the package provides conventions for POST, PUT, and PATCH requests based on the method name. This package also supports nested controllers using the namespace to determine the route.

Using this package, you can still register routes traditionally as outlined in the Laravel documentation. In other words, not all routes need to be discoverable routes.

This package can also map routes to Blade templates, allowing you to map view files to a route dynamically. Here's an example from the documentation:

// config/route-discovery
'discover_views_in_directory' => [
'docs' => resource_path('views/docs'),
],
 
/*
in `views/docs`
 
/docs --> index.blade.php
/docs/page-a --> pageA.blade.php
/docs/page-b --> pageB.blade.php
/docs/nested --> nested/index.blade.php
*/

This package also includes various PHP attributes to customize routes, HTTP methods, route names, etc. Check out the Mapping controllers to routes documentation for more details on the PHP attributes available.

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub. Be sure the check out the official documentation for details on getting started.

Paul Redmond photo

Full stack web developer. Author of Lumen Programming Guide and Docker for PHP Developers.

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