Count Models With the Laravel Visits Package

September 15, 2018 / Paul Redmond

Laravel Visits is a package by Bader Almutairi for attaching counters to any model to track visits with tags. The main features this package provides, include the following:

• A model item can have many types of recorded visits (using tags).
• It’s not limited to one kind of Model (like some packages that allow only User model).
• Record per visitors and not by visits using IP detecting, so even with refresh visit won’t duplicate (can be changed from config).
• Get Top/Lowest visits per a model.
• Get most visited countries …
• Get visits per a period like a month of a year of an item or model.

Counting Models

The basic usage for counting models includes the following methods for incrementing and decrementing among others:

visits($post)->increment();

// More than one
visits($post)->increment(10);

visits($post)->decrement();

// More than one
visits($post)->decrement(10);

// Only increment once every 30 seconds based on user's IP
visits($post)->seconds(30)->increment()

Getting Data

Once you’ve collected counter data for your model, you can retrieve and filter results with the following:

visits($post)->count();

visits($post)->period('day')->count();

// With the model class
visits('App\Post')->count();

You can also collect other interesting data about country and referrer if you want a quick analytics tool for tracking models:

visits($post)->countries();

// Referrers of visitors
visits($post)->refs();

The geo data for the country functionality is provided through the Torann/laravel-geoip package.

Integration with Eloquent

You can integrate this package directly into your Eloquent model by defining a method like visits:

public function visits()
{
    return visits($this);
}

And then performing calls on the visits object:

$post = Post::find(1);
$post->visits()->increment();
$post->visits()->count();

Learn More

To view the full readme, including installation instructions and source code, check this package out on the GitHub repo awssat/laravel-visits. Great work Bader!

Filed in: Laravel Packages