Automating your service and repository patterns in Laravel with command generators

Setting up your command

We’ll skip the part where we guide you through a Laravel install, give you a 4,000 history of PHP and get to the point. Inside your app/Console directory, there should be a directory called Commands. If not, make one. Then, inside that, we’re going to create a file called MakeService.php.

You can even use the php artisan make:command command to automate your automation, although we’ll be changing most of the boilerplate code soon.

Instead of extending the normal Command class, we’re going to change that. Make yours look like the below:

1<?php
2
3namespace App\Console\Commands;
4
5use Illuminate\Console\GeneratorCommand;
6
7class MakeService extends GeneratorCommand
8{
9    /**
10     * The name and signature of the console command.
11     *
12     * @var string
13     */
14    protected $signature = 'make:service';
15
16    /**
17     * The console command description.
18     *
19     * @var string
20     */
21    protected $description = 'Create a new service';
22}
23

You may have noticed that we deleted the handle() method since we’re not going to be using, although if you have custom logic, you can leave it in. Just don’t forget to call parent::handle() inside the method.

Overriding the default methods

The GeneratorCommand command comes with a lot of methods that Laravel uses to know what to create, what to change and where to change it. We need to override a few of those with our child class.

All of the below should be added to your MakeService class.

1    protected $type = 'Service';
2
3    protected function getDefaultNamespace($rootNamespace)
4    {
5        return $rootNamespace . '\Services';
6    }
7
8	protected function getStub()
9    {
10        return base_path('stubs/service.stub');
11    }
12
13    protected function getPath($name)
14    {
15        $name = Str::replaceFirst($this->rootNamespace(), '', $name);
16
17        return $this->laravel['path'] . '/' . str_replace('\\', '/', $name) . 'Service.php';
18    }
19
20    protected function replaceClass($stub, $name)
21    {
22        $name .= 'Service';
23        $class = str_replace($this->getNamespace($name) . '\\', '', $name);
24
25        // Do string replacement
26        return str_replace('##service_name##', $class, $stub);
27    }

Creating a stub

You may have noticed the getStub()method above. This is reading a template file, and then creating a PHP file from that template. This doesn’t exist, so we need to create it. In our case, we’re doing that inside a stubs/service.stub file from our project root.

There’s nothing special about this file extension. It’s just to ensure that our server doesn’t consider it a PHP file. The file itself is extremely simple:

<?php

namespace App\Services;

class ##service_name##
{
    //
}

Running your new command

If you run php artisan list, you’ll see that you now have an entry for make:service on the list. We can now run php artisan make:service and our friendly Artisan will ask us:

What should the service be named?

Artisan

Give your new service its naming ceremony (don’t write ‘Service’ at the end, we’ll do that automatically) et voila, inside your app/Services folder will now reside a shiny new service for you to use.

What else can I do?

This is a very basic example, but it opens up a realm of possibilities for automating and standardising your workflow. In our case, we went on to create a facade for that service and then inject the accessor into a FacadeServiceProvider so all of our new services were instantly registered and available as Facades.

If you override the handle method as explained above, you can also call other Artisan commands as part of your own using the same input. For example:

1    public function handle()
2    {
3        parent::handle();
4        if ($this->confirm('Do you want to create a facade for this service?')) {
5            $name = $this->getNameInput();
6            Artisan::call('make:facade ' . $name . ' \\\App\\\Services\\\\' . $name . "Service");
7        }
8    }