Self-healing URLs in Laravel

Laravel community member Aaron Francis shared an awesome video demonstrating how to Make self-healing URLs with Laravel. Without surprise, multiple packages in the Laravel ecosystem have already surfaced:

• Luke Downing's package: self-healing-urls
• Chris Page's package: laravel-self-healing-urls

These packages have a similar goal: you can change your model's route slug at will or only partially match a URL and never have to worry about SEO indexing when the slug changes. Both packages work by adding a trait to a model (this example is taken from Luke's package), which handles identifying the model via route model binding:

use Lukeraymonddowning\SelfHealingUrls\Concerns\HasSelfHealingUrls;
 
class Post extends Model
{
    use HasSelfHealingUrls;
 
    // Optional custom model property (default is `slug`)
    protected $slug = 'title';
}

Note: both packages have different implementations, so be sure to follow the respective README files to get started.

Luke's package also has the ability to customize the way a slug is joined to a model identifier; you can create your own custom IdentifierHandler implementation. At the time of writing, the package ships with a HyphenIdentifierHandler that looks like this:

namespace Lukeraymonddowning\SelfHealingUrls\IdentifierHandlers;
 
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
use Lukeraymonddowning\SelfHealingUrls\Contracts\IdentifierHandler;
 
class HyphenIdentifierHandler implements IdentifierHandler
{
    public function joinToSlug(string $slug, string|int $identifier): string
    {
        return "{$slug}-{$identifier}";
    }
 
    public function separateFromSlug(string $value): string
    {
        return Str::afterLast($value, '-');
    }
}

You can implement this interface to come up with your customized handler if you want to use a different identifier than a slug and a unique identifier separated by a hyphen (-). I'd encourage you to watch Aaron's video to see what's going on under the hood in Laravel and try both implementations to see what you like.