Annotations for The Laravel Framework

During its early stages of development, Laravel 5.0 was gearing up to support Route and Event annotations. With much controversy and discussion on the matter, @taylorotwell decided to remove Annotation support from the core in favor of extracting Laravel Annotation Support to a third-party package. The result of this decision resulted in this package being maintained by a huge fan of Laravel Annotations.

Installation

If you have changed the top-level namespace to something like 'MyCompany', then you would use the new namespace instead of 'App'.

Begin by installing this package through Composer. Edit your project's composer.json file to require laravelcollective/annotations.

"require": {
    "laravelcollective/annotations": "~5.0"
}

Next, update Composer from the Terminal:

composer update

Once composer is done, you'll need to create a Service Provider in app/Providers/AnnotationsServiceProvider.php.

<?php namespace App\Providers;

use Collective\Annotations\AnnotationsServiceProvider as ServiceProvider;

class AnnotationsServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider {

    /**
     * The classes to scan for event annotations.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $scanEvents = [];

    /**
     * The classes to scan for route annotations.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $scanRoutes = [];

    /**
     * Determines if we will auto-scan in the local environment.
     *
     * @var bool
     */
    protected $scanWhenLocal = false;

}

Finally, add your new provider to the providers array of config/app.php:

  'providers' => [
    // ...
    'App\Providers\AnnotationsServiceProvider',
    // ...
  ];

Usage

Setting up Scanning

Scanning your controllers for annotations can be configured by editing the protected $scanEvents and protected $scanRoutes in your AnnotationsServiceProvider. For example, if you wanted to scan App\Handlers\Events\MailHandler for event annotations, you would add it to protected $scanEvents like so:

    /**
     * The classes to scan for event annotations.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $scanEvents = [
      'App\Handlers\Events\MailHandler',
    ];

Likewise, if you wanted to scan App\Http\Controllers\HomeController for route annotations, you would add it to protected $scanRoutes like so:

    /**
     * The classes to scan for route annotations.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $scanRoutes = [
      'App\Http\Controllers\HomeController',
    ];

Scanning your event handlers and controllers can be done manually by using php artisan event:scan and php artisan route:scan respectively, or automatically by setting protected $scanWhenLocal = true.

Event Annotations

@Hears

The @Hears annotation registers an event listener for a particular event. Annotating any method with @Hears("SomeEventName") will register an event listener that will call that method when the SomeEventName event is fired.

<?php namespace App\Handlers\Events;

use App\User;

class MailHandler {

  /**
   * Send welcome email to User
   * @Hears("UserWasRegistered")
   */
  public function sendWelcomeEmail(User $user)
  {
    // send welcome email to $user
  }

}

Route Annotations

@Get

The @Get annotation registeres a route for an HTTP GET request.

<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers;

class HomeController {

  /**
   * Show the Index Page
   * @Get("/")
   */
  public function getIndex()
  {
    return view('index');
  }

}

You can also set up route names.

  /**
   * @Get("/", as="index")
   */

... or middlewares.

  /**
   * @Get("/", middleware="guest")
   */

... or both.

  /**
   * @Get("/", as="index", middleware="guest")
   */

Here's an example that uses all of the available parameters for a @Get annotation:

  /**
   * @Get("/profiles/{id}", as="profiles.show", middleware="guest", domain="foo.com", where={"id": "[0-9]+"})
   */

@Post, @Options, @Put, @Patch, @Delete, @Any

The @Post, @Options, @Put, @Patch, @Delete and @Any annotations have the exact same syntax as the @Get annotation, except it will register a route for the respective HTTP verb, as opposed to the GET verb.

@Middleware

As well as defining middleware inline in the route definition tags (@Get, @Post, etc.), the @Middleware tag can be used on its own. It works both individual methods:

  /**
   * Show the Login Page
   *
   * @Get("login")
   * @Middleware("guest")
   */
  public function login()
  {
    return view('index');
  }

Or on a whole controller, with the same only/exclude filter syntax that you can use elsewhere in laravel:

/**
 * @Middleware("guest", except={"logout"})
 */
class AuthController extends Controller {

  /**
   * Log the user out.
   *
   * @Get("logout", as="logout")
   * @Middleware("auth")
   *
   * @return Response
   */
  public function logout()
  {
    $this->auth->logout();

    return redirect( route('login') );
  }

}