How to create custom Facade in Laravel 4

Question

Looked up a few tutorials on facades and laravel 4... tried some... not liked the way they work.

For instance, they don't all provide a way of defining where to store the facade files and service providers... and i tried to step away from that and got my head bumped into a few walls until i decided to do this thread.

So: Let's say i have an app called Laracms (laravel cms).

I'd like to store everything i create - facades, service providers, etc in a folder under app named laracms.

So i'd have /app/laracms/facades, /app/laracms/serviceproviders and so on. I don't want to mix the facades with the database models, i want to keep things as separate as possible.

Let's take now, in my case, the Settings name for the facade (i want to implement a settings class to use in views and admin to set up misc. stuff).

Settings::get(), Settings::set() as methods.

Can anyone explain how to set facades up correctly? I don't know what i'm doing wrong and i need a fresh start.

Thanks, Chris

Looking for a step by step with simple explanations of how and why.

Answer 1

First you need to go to app/config/app.php and in providers section add:

'Laracms\Providers\SettingsServiceProvider',

In the same file in aliases section you should add:

 'Settings' => 'Laracms\Facades\Settings',

In your app/Laracms/Providers you should create file SettingsServiceProvider.php

<?php

namespace Laracms\Providers;

use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;

class SettingsServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider {

    public function register()
    {
        $this->app->bind('settings', function()
            {
                return new \Laracms\Settings();
            });
    }

}

In your app/Laracms/Facades/ you should create file Settings.php:

<?php

namespace Laracms\Facades;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade;

class Settings extends Facade {

    protected static function getFacadeAccessor() { return 'settings'; }

}

Now in your app/Laracms directory you should create file Settings.php:

<?php

namespace Laracms;

class Settings {
   public function get() {echo "get"; }

   public function set() {echo "set"; }
}

As you wanted to have your files in custom folder Laracms you need to add this folder to your composer.json (If you used standard app/models folder you wouldn't need to add anything to this file). So now open composer.json file and in section autoload -> classmap you should add app/Laracms so this section of composer.json could look like this:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        "app/commands",
        "app/controllers",
        "app/models",
        "app/database/migrations",
        "app/database/seeds",
        "app/tests/TestCase.php",
        "app/Laracms"
    ]
},

Now you need to run in your console inside your project foler:

composer dump-autoload

to create class map

If everything is fine, you should now be able to use in your applications Settings::get() and Settings:set()

You need to notice that I used folders with uppercases because namespaces by convention starts with upper letters.