I have a Page model without a path column. The path is derived from the slug and the nested parent_id hierarchy, and it’s rebuilt every time it’s accessed.

Example

/about/team/history
slug: "history"
parent slug: "team"
parent slug: "about"

I've enabled strict models, so I get lazy-loading exceptions unless I eager-load parents. The problem is:

• The nesting depth is unknown (could be 1 level or 10 levels deep).
• I could eager-load with something like with('parent.parent.parent...'), but that's brittle.
• I'm aware of Model::automaticallyEagerLoadRelationships(), but I'm unsure if that's a good idea here.

Here's my current Page model approach:

public function parent(): BelongsTo
{
    return $this->belongsTo(self::class);
}

public function path(): string
{
    $segments = [];
    $page = $this;

    while ($page) {
        $segments[] = $page->slug;
        $page = $page->parent;
    }

    $segments = array_reverse($segments);

    return '/' . ltrim(implode('/', $segments), '/');
}

This works, but I call path() in many places (Search queries, Livewire components, etc.), so it feels like I'm paying for this computation over and over - plus it triggers parent loads.

My question

Is there a Laravel "industry standard" for this?

Should I stick with on-the-fly path building and recursive eager loading, or is the recommended approach to add a path column and keep it in sync with slug & parent_id (for example with an Observer)?

Or would a package like https://github.com/staudenmeir/laravel-adjacency-list or https://github.com/lazychaser/laravel-nestedset be the best bet?

If anyone has had a similar issue, I'd love to hear the different solutions you've come up with.