Service Providers
An essential part of a package is its Service Provider. Before creating our own, I'll explain what service providers are about in this section first. If you are familiar with service providers, please continue to the next section.
As you might know, Laravel comes with a series of service providers, namely the AppServiceProvider, AuthServiceProvider, BroadcastServiceProvider, EventServiceProvider and RouteServiceProvider. These providers take care of "bootstrapping" (or "registering") application-specific services (as service container bindings), event listeners, middleware, and routes.
Every service provider extends the Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider and implements a register() and a boot() method.
The boot() method is used to bind things in the service container. After all other service providers have been registered (i.e., all register() methods of all service providers were called, including third-party packages), Laravel will call the boot() method on all service providers.
In the register() method, you might register a class binding in the service container, enabling a class to be resolved from the container. However, sometimes you will need to reference another class, in which case the boot() method can be used.
Here is an example of how a service provider may look and which things you might implement in a register() and boot() method.
<?php
use App\Calculator;
use Illuminate\Support\Collection;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Gate;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
public function register()
{
// Register a class in the service container
$this->app->bind('calculator', function ($app) {
return new Calculator();
});
}
public function boot()
{
// Register a macro, extending the Illuminate\Collection class
Collection::macro('rejectEmptyFields', function () {
return $this->reject(function ($entry) {
return $entry === null;
});
});
// Register an authorization policy
Gate::define('delete-post', function ($user, $post) {
return $user->is($post->author);
});
}
}
Creating a Service Provider
We will create a service provider for our package, which contains specific information about our package's core. The package might use a config file, maybe some views, routes, controllers, database migrations, model factories, custom commands, etc. The service provider needs to register them. We will discuss each of these in subsequent chapters.
Since we've pulled in Orchestra Testbench, we can extend the Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider and create our service provider in the src/ directory as shown (replace naming with your details):
<?php
namespace JohnDoe\BlogPackage;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class BlogPackageServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
public function register()
{
//
}
public function boot()
{
//
}
}
Autoloading
To automatically register it with a Laravel project using Laravel's package auto-discovery we add our service provider to the "extra"> "laravel"> "providers" key in our package's composer.json:
{
...,
"autoload": { ... },
"extra": {
"laravel": {
"providers": [
"JohnDoe\\BlogPackage\\BlogPackageServiceProvider"
]
}
}
}
Now, whenever someone includes our package, the service provider will be loaded, and everything we've registered will be available in the application. Now let's see what we might want to register in this service provider.
Important: this feature is available starting from Laravel 5.5. With version 5.4 or below, you must register your service providers manually in the providers section of the config/app.php configuration file in your laravel project.