About Service Providers

There was a discussion here on the forum about service providers, where people explained some basic stuff about them but I don't remember the name of the thread and I can't find it.

Anyway, watch this video:

The Service Container

@AkiyamaSmart Hey.

As often said, service providers are the building stones of Laravel. As you may know, Laravel depends on its powerfull IoC container (often referred as Service Container). We can imagine that the IoC Container as the spinal cord and the service providers as the vertebrae.

When laravel bootstraps, it will "attach the vertebrae (service providers) to the spinal cord (IoC container)". If you take a look at laravel's code, you will find out that there are quite a bit of service providers.

So what exactly are those service providers do? The service providers usually bind some classes to the IoC container so you can use them later in your application.

Service providers basically creates object with parameters for you and binds it to IoC container.

For example you need some outside service to integrate in project. But services api package requires to set up object in certain way. For example creating object requires username and password parameters. So you have two options create object in every case with user and pasword or place this logic in service provider.

Example code:

public function register() {
    $this->app->bind('someApi', function($app) {
        return new SomeApi('username', 'password');
    });
}

Later elsewhere in app you just can:

$apiObject = app('someApi');

... and you get complete object.

Reading: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/container

Thank you for your replies, I'll take my time to read all of them. and hopefully I won't have to go back for more Questions :p

Register method of a service provider is used to bind interfaces to concrete implementations.

Boot method of the service provider is used as a bootstrap method.

This is separated because all register methods of all service providers are run before the boot method, so all interfaces are bound.

In fact it is a class used to bootstrap things. Thing can be a package or the whole app or whatever.

Adding to @pmall post: boot method is useful when you are using class that is binded to container in register method and probably is not available at this moment. ... also there is thing like deferred services, but you will probably learn about them when you will really need them :)

boot method is useful when you are using class that is binded to container in register method and probably is not available at this moment

Yes this is what I said boot method are run after register methods :)