What exactly is a slug?

A slug is part of (if not all of) the path in a url. Usually slug's are used to for SEO friendly url's to point to things such as forum posts, product pages, etc.

// Full Url
https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/what-exactly-is-a-slug

// A Path
discuss/channels/laravel/what-exactly-is-a-slug

// A Slug
what-exactly-is-a-slug

oh awesome, thank you!

thanks

Slugs serve a variety of purposes. In their basic form, they're useful for:

1. Friendly URLs. Also plays well with SEO
2. They can also serve as a unique identifier to a resource.
3. They can be used to mask ID's from your database table. For example, if you didn't want to expose the id of an article, e.g: /articles/1, you could use a slug instead /articles/this-is-my-article

EDIT: Apologies for bumping this thread. It appears Laracasts has had an update to the date/time, and since i'm in a timezone +12/13, it's playing up with my feed.

Furthermore, slug() takes care of unwanted characters - does some sanitization. This is a definition of slug():

  /**
     * Generate a URL friendly "slug" from a given string.
     *
     * @param  string  $title
     * @param  string  $separator
     * @param  string|null  $language
     * @return string
     */
public static function slug($title, $separator = '-', $language = 'en')
    {
        $title = $language ? static::ascii($title, $language) : $title;

        // Convert all dashes/underscores into separator
        $flip = $separator === '-' ? '_' : '-';

        $title = preg_replace('!['.preg_quote($flip).']+!u', $separator, $title);

        // Replace @ with the word 'at'
        $title = str_replace('@', $separator.'at'.$separator, $title);

        // Remove all characters that are not the separator, letters, numbers, or whitespace.
        $title = preg_replace('![^'.preg_quote($separator).'\pL\pN\s]+!u', '', static::lower($title));

        // Replace all separator characters and whitespace by a single separator
        $title = preg_replace('!['.preg_quote($separator).'\s]+!u', $separator, $title);

        return trim($title, $separator);
    }

from: Illuminate\Support\Str\slug()

This SPATIE pack helps to generate slugs in your models for further use

https://github.com/spatie/laravel-sluggable