Laravel Shareable Models Package

The Laravel Shareable Models package allows you to generate shareable links from your Eloquent models. Think dynamic routes which only exist for models that have been shared.

The package author Kai Sassnowski described his use-case for the Shareable Models package as follows:

My initial use case was giving certain non-admin user access to a certain resource that is usually only accessible through the admin interface.

Instead of mucking around with special permissions I created this method to create a completely new link from the resource that I wanted to share, that I could then treat like any other route in my application. So a separate controller and separate views. In that route, you can then simply only expose the functionality that you want (make it read-only for example or only show certain fields).

This package reminds me of the “get shareable link” feature in Google Drive. You could use this package in a file sharing application to share a particular model to outside users, but also be selective about which files, and which information you expose.

You can also do things like setting a password and an expiration date on shareable links, which require the user to enter a secret password. The package also ships with a password view that you can customize.

A basic example of creating a shareable link looks like the following:

<?php
 
$article = Article::find(1);
 
$link = ShareableLink::buildFor($article)
    ->setActive()
    ->build();

When you call build() you create the shareable link in the database, which uses a Polymorphic relationship to associate an article with a shareable link.

A shareable route might look something like the following:

Route::get('shared/{shareable_link}', ['middleware' => 'shared', function (ShareableLink $link) {
    return $link->shareable;
});

The shareable property is the associated model, so in the routing example above it would return a JSON version of the model.

Here’s an example of what a URL might look like using this package:

$ curl http://localhost:8000/shared/4aQQLDa525h8NVPGxLZ4hqx0l46
 
{
  "id": 1,
  "title": "The Raven",
  "contents": "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary...",
  "created_at": "2017-05-31 19:35:28",
  "updated_at": "2017-05-31 19:35:28"
}

To learn more about the Laravel Shareable Models package, check out the documentation and the GitHub repository.