Share models between two Laravel projects

You can use modules for this. For example

- App A/Models/User.php

- App B/Http/Controllers/AuthController.php

If you want to use User.php from App A in your routes.php from app B you can reference it using the following piece of code.

// AuthController.php
public function postResetPassword($request) {
    AppB\Models\User::findByEmail($request->only('email')); // Or use it on top of the document, you get the point.
}

There is also a great package for this. For this package click here.

Hello, and welcome here.

I feel there's quite a contradiction in your approach. It would make sense if you use the same database/model to have a single Laravel application. By using two applications you will make things only harder to manage and to maintain. What are the reasons behind this choice ? Maybe we can suggest a better solution ?

@RemiC thank you for trying to help me. The two applications are different in use but they use the same database/models. It would be hard for us to make all that in single project, (so many views so many controllers etc...).

Let me give you an example similar to our project. A manufacturer have a (Production Application) and (Sales Application), they share the same database (they may have also their own db) they are really different and making them in the same project will be hard at the end of the day.

@Erik did you mean AppA\Models\User... ? But how is the folder structure ?

If both application are on the same server you can simply symlink models folder(create it if it doesn't exist) from one app to another.

You can even go futher and make a standalone composer package with you models. Develop it separately and require it in your projects via composer. Seems like a good idea for me.

@arrilot : as appealing as it may seems, I don't think using symlink is a good idea. What if after 6 months they decide to move the Apps to their own servers to horizontally scale ?

+1 for making a composer package, that's the only way I would suggest for sharing code between applications.

I've recently worked on a project that had similar requirements, where we had to have multiple Laravel projects use the same Model layer. My approach was along the lines of what @Arrilot is suggesting: creating a Composer package and then require it in your projects through Composer. In my case, I just had Composer pull in the Git repository

"repositories":[
   {
      "type":"git",
      "url":"git@bitbucket.org:company-git-name/company-shared.git"
   }
],

"require":{
   "laravel/framework":"5.0.*",
   "company-git-name/company-shared":"dev-develop"
},

There's a bit more information about how I went about this here: http://raphaeldavinci.com/laravel-shared-model/

Hopefully this helps!

@RemiC Well they can switch from symlink to a composer package as soon as they need it, no problem here.

Symlink is just the fastest and the easiest way for the simplest scenario

Hi @Raph ! trying to make an "admin" here. I have already the "client/app" and the model classes are shared too. However, the method "Auth::loginUsingId();" will be very useful to log as the user and see exactly what's happening, but with your solution, as only the classes are shared, won't be available.

How you handle that? or it's possible what I need?

Thanks! =)

Just bumping this to say thanks for the idea. @Raph's method worked for me. Here's my situation:

Laravel install for the main app Lumen as a worker app that handles various tasks behind the scenes. This runs on a separate server.

I share models between these. It worked fine just created them by hand and keeping them in sync but that just seemed so dirty.

I set up a private composer package with App\ as the namespace, added the repo to both my composer.json files, and things work fine.

It's a little annoying to have to commit, push, and run composer update to reflect changes in models, but I only have to do this sometimes.

I have created a step by step tutorial for sharing Eloquent Models between multiple applications. It will publish a package on a private GitHub repository which can further be used as a composer dependency.

https://ambujsoni.medium.com/share-laravel-eloquent-models-between-multiple-applications-179d8f31078c

Hope this could help.

@raph I am working on a project that has a same requirement. Should I also create a private repository for migration files as well as factory files as they are allow us to create and seed database in single command?