Add Likes, Bookmarks, Favorites, and Other Marks in your Application With Laravel Markable

Published on April 12th, 2022 by Paul Redmond

Laravel Markable is a package to Integrate likes, bookmarks, favorites, reactions, and custom-made marks into your application.

The basic usage is adding a Markable trait and types of "marks" you want to allow for a given model. For example, if you have a Course model and you want to let users like the course:

namespace App\Models;
 
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Maize\Markable\Markable;
use Maize\Markable\Models\Like;
 
class Course extends Model
{
    use Markable;
 
    protected $fillable = [
        'title',
        'description',
    ];
 
    protected static $marks = [
        Like::class,
    ];
}

With that model in place, here's what it looks like to manage marks using this package:

use App\Models\Course;
use Maize\Markable\Models\Like;
 
// marks the course liked for the given user
Like::add($course, $user);
 
// unmarks the course liked for the given user
Like::remove($course, $user);
 
// toggles the course like for the given user
Like::toggle($course, $user);
 
// returns whether the given user likes a course or not
Like::has($course, $user);
 
// returns how many users like a course
Like::count($course);

The Like model is built-in to the package, but you can also build custom mark models, such as Pledge that allows a user to pledge a donation to a cause.

The package includes various mark types out-of-the-box, including:

Bookmark
Favorite
Like
Reaction

On the other side of adding a Like for a user, you might what to list all likes for a given user so they can see what courses they've liked:

// All course models with a like from the given user
Course::whereHasLike(
    auth()->user()
)->get();
 
// All post models with a 'heart' reaction from the given user
Post::whereHasReaction(
    auth()->user(),
    'heart'
)->get();