0004-controllers.md

Controllers

Controllers are an alternative to Closures for defining the application logic

Generating a new Controller

php artisan make:controller ControllerNameController

Controllers are stored inside the app/Http/Controllers folder

An example controller class

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return view('home');
    }
    
    public function contact()
    {
        return view('contact');
    }
}

Controllers do not have to extend the base App\Http\Controllers\Controller class, but it provides some convienience methods.

Route definition for the above controller (routes/web.php):

Route::get('/', 'HomeController@home');
Route::get('/contact', 'HomeController@contact');

We don't have to specify the full controller namespace in web.php. It's enough to specify everything after App\Http\Controllers.

RouteServiceProvider will is responsible for prepending the App\Http\Controllers namespace to controller names in routes.

Single Action Controllers

For controllers that handle just a single action:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;

class HomeSingleController extends Controller
{
    public function __invoke()
    {
        return view('home');
    }
}

Route definition (routes/web.php)

Route::get('home', 'HomeSingleController');

Generating a single action controller

php artisan make:controller HomeSingleController --invokable

The __invoke is a magic PHP method that allows the object to be called like a function, eg.

$controller = new HomeSingleController();
$controller();

Of course you would never create controller classes yourself, Laravel handles that. This is just an example of how invokable object (object that can be called like it would be a function) in PHP looks like.

Routing

The action function generates a URL for the given controller action

$url = action('HomeController@home');