Laravel News: Creating Your Own PHP Helpers in a Laravel Project

The Laravel News site has a quick post sharing a helpful topic for the Laravel users out there. In the tutorial they show how to create custom helpers for use across the entire application in any scope.

Laravel provides many excellent helper functions that are convenient for doing things like working with arrays, file paths, strings, and routes, among other things like the beloved dd() function.

You can also define your own set of helper functions for your Laravel applications and PHP packages, by using Composer to import them automatically.

If you are new to Laravel or PHP, let’s walk through how you might go about creating your own helper functions that automatically get loaded by Laravel.

The tutorial starts off by recommending the placement of the custom helper file and how to ensure it's autoloaded when the application is bootstrapped. It then covers the creation of the helper functions including the use of if checks to ensure there's not a function naming collision. Finally the post includes an example of a helper file, sharing the creation of two methods: show_route and plural_from_model. The post ends with a look at packages and how to include helper files inside of them for use in your application.