Custom Helper function

Introduction#

Adding custom helpers can assist you with your development speed. There are a few things to take into consideration while writing such helper functions though, hence this tutorial.

Remarks#

Just a few pointers:

We’ve put the function definitions within a check (function_exists) to prevent exceptions when the service provider is called twice.
An alternative way is registering the helpers file from the composer.json file. You can copy the logic from the laravel framework itself.

document.php

<?php

if (!function_exists('document')) {
    function document($text = '') {
        return $text;
    }
}

Create a helpers.php file, let’s assume for now it lives in app/Helpers/document.php. You can put many helpers in one file (this is how Laravel does it) or you can split them up by name.

HelpersServiceProvider.php

Now let’s create a service provider. Let’s put it under app/Providers:

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

class HelpersServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function register()
    {
        require_once __DIR__ . '/../Helpers/document.php';
    }
}

The above service provider load the helpers file and registers your custom function automatically. Please make sure you register this HelpersServiceProvider in your config/app.php under providers:

'providers' => [
     // [..] other providers
     App\Providers\HelpersServiceProvider::class,
]

Use

Now you can use the function document() everywhere in your code, for example in blade templates. This example only returns the same string it receives as an argument

<?php
Route::get('document/{text}', function($text) { 
    return document($text);
});

Now go to /document/foo in your browser (use php artisan serve or valet), which will return foo.