Laravel firstOrFail forTheWin

Tiny controllers are so attractive and crisp. I love it when you are able to have a simple two line method but still keep all the functionality you need. A common pattern in building CRUD applications is showing a record by id or slug and I want to show how to easily set this up.

Here is my controller method:

public function getPost($slug)
{
    $post = Post::where('slug', '=', $slug)->firstOrFail();
 
    return View::make(‘details’, compact(‘post’));
}

And the last step is to listen for the exception which I add in filters.php:

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModelNotFoundException;
 
App::error(function(ModelNotFoundException $e)
{
    return Response::make('Not Found', 404);
});

This is covered in the Laravel documentation but I think it’s so beautiful that I wanted to highlight it.