php - Laravel 5 package development

Question

I am having trouble to create package in Laravel 5 as workbench has been removed.

As in this thread (How create package in Laravel 5?), Goldorak suggest that we have to create our own package structure ourselves.

So, how can I create the workbench manually and get everything ready for package development?

Answer 1

Using the laravel Workbench package:

You can add the illuminate/workbench package in a Laravel 5 by adding to your composer.json:

"illuminate/workbench": "dev-master"

then add the WorkbenchServiceProvider into your config/app.php file:

'IlluminateWorkbenchWorkbenchServiceProvider'

Now you need to create the config/workbench.php file since it has been removed from Laravel 5:

<?php

return [
    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Workbench Author Name
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | When you create new packages via the Artisan "workbench" command your
    | name is needed to generate the composer.json file for your package.
    | You may specify it now so it is used for all of your workbenches.
    |
    */
    'name' => '',
    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Workbench Author E-Mail Address
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Like the option above, your e-mail address is used when generating new
    | workbench packages. The e-mail is placed in your composer.json file
    | automatically after the package is created by the workbench tool.
    |
    */
    'email' => '',
];

Fill your information in this config file then you will be able to use the workbench command:

php artisan workbench vendor/name

---

Creating your own package structure

In this exemple we will create our package called awesome in a packages directory.

Here is the package structure:

packages/
  vendor/
    awesome/
      src/
        Awesome.php
      composer.json

• Vendor: your vendor name, typically this is your github username.
• Awesome: the name of your package
• src: Where you put the business logic

To generate a composer.json file you can use this command in the packages/vendor/awesome directory:

composer init

Now we create a Awesome.php class in the src directory with a simple method:

<?php namespace Vendor/Awesome;

class Awesome
{
    public static function printAwesomeness()
    {
        echo 'Awesome';
    }
}

After that we add the package to the laravel composer.json psr-4 autoloader:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App": "app/",
        "Vendor\Awesome": "packages/vendor/awesome/src"
    }
},

and we dump the composer autoloader

composer dump-autoload

Now you can use your package everywhere in your laravel 5 project. If you need some laravel specific feature like service provider or view publishing, use them as described in the Laravel 5.0 documentation.