Developing your packages in Laravel 5

Not bad tip - ty

I realy appreciate your explanation.

@TaylorOtwell it should be nice to have some lessons about the package development.

I put my packages in a root folder called "packages", to avoid potential problems putting it in "vendor". Otherwise, similar set-up to what I'm doing.

@bbloom This method does put packages in a folder called "packages" in root. The vendor folder is for published packages.

Great! I was looking for this, thank you. You should make this a package. :D

Excellent post!

@davidxd33 Maybe a newbie question: I made a package using this post. It works very well! However, if I would like to include this package in another project using composer it wil be installed in the /vendor/ directory. Now I'm confused. we've hardcoded some links to the /packages/ dir in the code for example:

    public function boot()
    {
            $this->loadAutoloader(base_path('packages'));
    }

and

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Vendor\\Package\\": "packages/Vendor/Package/src"
    }
},

So, is this package not intended to be reused?

Check out https://github.com/franzliedke/studio

@dberry Thanks for the reply. Can you tell me why it is bad to develop in the vendor directory? To me it looks like the easiest way right now.

The vendor directory should be packages that are managed by composer, it's not a development directory.

I mean technically you could, but it's frowned upon. Using something like Studio, it's extremely simple to do what you're wanting to do, it takes care of all of the auto-loading for you kind of like the old workbench feature in Laravel 4.2 did, with the exception of it's cleaner (as it's a composer plugin) and it's not Laravel specific (meaning it doesn't do the service provider, etc...)

OK, thanks @dberry

Thanks for sharing your approach.

I created a cli tool that creates a package for you very easily: https://github.com/Jeroen-G/laravel-packager I just finished it, I'd love to get feedback on it.

Guys, is there a way to register a package's service provider from within that package? I.e. can I register a service provider without adding it to the 'providers' array in 'config/app.php'?

@tomicakorac you can use $this->app->register('Acme\ServiceProvider'); to register a different service provider from your own service provider.

@MarkRedeman thanks. That much I got, but I see now that my question isn't quite complete.

So I do know that I can register a new service provider with:

$this->app->register('Acme\ServiceProvider');

but I'm not sure where is the best place to put that line. My idea is to create vendor/package/bootstrap/autoload.php, place $this->app->register('Acme\ServiceProvider'); in it, and then autoload that file from the package's composer.json. But autoloading it isn't going to automatically run it on application boot, is it?

Hey Guys , I might be a bit late, but here is a complete explanation about it .... might be helpful

https://github.com/jaiwalker/setup-laravel5-package

thanks for that link @iddigital ! exactly what I was looking for

Most of the time you only need to merge the "workbench" packages composer.json with the root composer.json, and this https://github.com/wikimedia/composer-merge-plugin seem to handle it. I do see some issue when depending on "dev" requirement but the just might be an issue on my end.

@crynobone is that a response to my question? If yes, can you please elaborate on where should I place this: $this->app->register('Acme\ServiceProvider'); to make it automatically register my service provider?

No @tomicakorac, but as per your question, you should look at AggregateServiceProvider, e.g https://github.com/floatingpointsoftware/stylist/blob/master/src/Stylist/StylistServiceProvider.php

Awesome post my friend!

Great post, thank you for sharing!

Depending on the possibly of adding, updating or removing I to don't necessarily put packages in the vender folder. So as a few stated there are different ways of doing it.

Example I have a basic dynamic site structure with front and backend that I use frequently that is to time consuming to fork just for small tweaks. And of course the blog, discussion board etc. But user roles that can get to complicated to change or 99% chance will never change I pull in as a package in the vendor folder.

How do you use dependancies? For example if I want my package to user Intervention Image..? And how can you test this during development?

Hey @notflip did you ever manage to find any documentation or help regarding including dependencies during your package development? I can't seem to find a way for my package to find the classes that im requiring with composer... Thank you very much in advance!

@memovillalobos There's a tutorial series released (checking part1 now) which covers all of it i think! https://laracasts.com/series/russian-doll-caching-in-laravel/

Didnt found anything on laracast but is there a lesson about package development?

I've been using the Studio package for development on (currently) private packages. However, we can't include the composer.lock file in git because of the symlinks Studio creates that won't be present on anyone else's machines (including production/staging).

Has anyone found a way to work around this so composer.lock doesn't break things with those machine specific symlinks?

For instance, here is the require block for composer.json:

"require": {
      "php": ">=7.0.0",
      "laravel/framework": "5.2.*",
      "our-repo/our-package": "dev-master",
}

And here is the repositories section necessary to declare the source of the private packages:

"repositories": [
      {
          "type": "git",
          "url": "[email protected]:our-repo/our-package.git"
      },
]

Everything works fine so long as composer.lock is ignored, but rest of the team is pushing to see that changed for consistency sake.

If I were to publish that composer.json file to git as is, wouldn't someone trying to use this package get an error that the packages directory couldn't be found?

I keep seeing people create this packages directory, but the packages directory is not listed in any composer files that i've seen in other packages, so I can assume I need to change it, but nobody has explicitly said that before publishing the package, you have to update your composer.json file. Can I get some clarity on the dev process of packages?

Hi @roblesterjr04,

Did you find a solution yet you care to share? Let me try to answer your question.

I think you are asking a few questions here: a) How can I use packages which are located in a local folder instead of pulled in via packagist? b) Should I change the local package reference when publishing my packages? If so, how? And when? c) What is a nice package development workflow?

So here we go.

For convenience, let's give the packages a name for clarification:

• ParentPackage: a package you are developing locally and intend to publish to packagist.org ASAP. This package depends on ChildPackage.
• ChildPackage: a package you are also developing locally and intend to publish to packagist.org ASAP. This package is required by the ParentPackage.

And let's assume you are open sourcing the packages, which means making them resolvable via packagist.org, so you can use composer require <vendor>/<package> to use them.

a) How can I use packages which are located in a local folder instead of pulled in via packagist?

This has been answered before in this thread. The gist of it is to include this in the ParentPackage's composer.json:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Vendor\\Package\\": "packages/Vendor/Package/src"
    }
},

And then don't forget to actually require the ChildPackage.

If this doesn't work, check if the ChildPackage's composer name settings (/) correspond with the one you're referencing here in the ParentPackage: "Vendor\\Package\\": "packages/Vendor/Package/src".

b) Should I change the local package reference when publishing my packages? If so, how? And when?

Yes, you should remove the local "repositories" reference from the ParentPackage before publication. Referencing packages locally is only for local development purposes.

But in order for your ParentPackage to keep functioning, it will need the ChildPackage. So you need the ChildPackage to be available via packagist.org.

That's why you publish the ChildPackage to packagist as soon as it is ready.

After that, you prepare the ParentPackage for publication:

1. remove the references to the ChildPackage from the repositories and the require arrays.
2. run rm -rf ./vendor in the directory of your ParentPackage folder. This removes all installed.
3. run composer require <your-child-package-reference-you-can-find-it-on-packagist>
4. run 'composer install` in the same directory to install all dependencies

Test your ParentPackage to see if all went well.

c) What is a nice package development workflow?

I think I have covered much of it. If you're still stuck with questions, tag me in or send me a PM.