Facades in laravel

Facades provide static like interface to services inside the service container. we can access underlying implementation on these services (methods and properties).

we can access every method in service classes without creating their instance(object). Mean it automatically resolve dependencies by creating instance of the service classes.

How facades work ?

1) The service class contain only one method 'getFacadeAccessor()'.

2 ) This class also extend facades base class

3) So when we call method of this class without instance like

cache::get('name)

4) It automatically call getFacadeAccessor() method create instance than find the method of the service class.

How do I create a facade class and use in my application ?

Since laravel largely uses facades rather every non static function has its equivalent facade available in service container, we must also follow the same way in our custom application.

All of Laravel’s facades are defined in the Illuminate\Support\Facades namespace. Let’s make a mini project.

Objective of this example

Our objective is to access hello() method of MyClass as static function i.e using Facade.

Step 1. Create a folder with the name “Facades” in app directory

Step 2. Create 2 Files in Facades directory

<?php
namespace App\Facades;

class MyClass{
    public function hello(){
        return 'Yes...It`s working';
    }
}

We created a simple class MyClass with function hello() which returns Yes…It`s working.

<?php
namespace App\Facades;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade;

class MyFacade extends Facade{
    protected static function getFacadeAccessor()
    {
        return 'my_facade';
    }
}

Next we created a facade class MyFacade which extends Facades base class. Inside MyFacade class we overriden getFacadeAccessor() from base class and this method returns a string, lets call it as alias name for MyClass class.

Step 3. Add the code in web.php

app()->bind('my_facade',function (){
    return new \App\Facades\MyClass();
});

use App\Facades\MyFacade;

dd(MyFacade::hello());

Finally in web.php we binded alias name my_facade with MyClass i.e whenever my_facade is invoked it laravel’s request pointer points to MyClass, indirectly making instance of the class. Lastly we used MyFacade and dump-n-died MyClass’s hello() method using MyFacade.

Quite simple, right ? Hehe.. it happens, but this way is more convenient when you are handling a quiet large project.

Why do we use facades ?

Facades provides many benefits as we discussed that syntax is very clean and memorable, it prevents the pain of creating instance of classes and more importantly all the dependencies are resolved and injected by service container itself. It is more like plug and play thing. Therefore learning and using facades in laravel is best thing to do first.

Useful lInks

https://programmer.help/blogs/about-the-advantages-of-using-the-laravel-service-container.html

https://www.codementor.io/@decodeweb/beginners-guide-to-facades-in-laravel-1457p3h4nd