New Route Methods introduced in Laravel 5.5

Laravel 5.5 shipped a couple of convenient shortcuts to the Laravel Router class that eliminates the need for creating a controller or closure only to return a simple view or redirect. If you missed them in the release notes, let’s look at them briefly, they are sure to simplify your code and remove a couple of files.

The Route::view method

The Route::view method eliminates the need for routes that only need a view returned. Instead of using a controller or a closure, you can define a URI and a path to a view file:

// resources/views/pages/about.blade.php
Route::view('/about', 'pages.about');

You can also pass in an array of variables that will be passed to the view:

Route::view('/about', 'pages.about', ['year' => date('Y')]);

The Route::redirect Method

The Route::redirect method also eliminates the need to create a controller or a closure only to return a redirect response:

Route::redirect('/old-about', '/about');

The third default argument, if not passed, is a 301 redirect. However, you can pass the third argument for a different status code. For example, if you want to create a 307 Temporary Redirect, it would look like this:

Route::redirect('/old-about', '/about', 307);

More Info

Laravel 5.5 is chalk-full of great new features; you can learn more by visiting our coverage of Laravel 5.5 and the official release notes.