Laravel Magic

If you are new to Laravel or any framework, You may be confused and sometimes when you start learning you may find some built-in classes or functions that you don't know where it comes from and sometimes you are saying It's a magic trick.

So, I will give you one Example of Laravel Magic.

In the following Image I created a simple command that count the user in Database and you can find that we used DB Class from Illuminate\Support\Facades

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

class MagicTrick extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'magic:run';

    protected $description = 'Show a magic trick';

    public function handle()
    {
        $usersCount = DB::table('users')->count();
        $this->info("Users count: $usersCount");
    }
}

And when we run it.

php artisan magic:run

We will find that.

Users count: 1

Till now its fine but what about if we removed this line use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\Command;

class MagicTrick extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'magic:run';

    protected $description = 'Show a magic trick';

    public function handle()
    {
        $usersCount = \DB::table('users')->count();
        $this->info("Users count: $usersCount");
    }
}

We will get the same result.

So How it works?

Laravel behind the scene uses class alias.

Let Me explain it in a simple way. For Example create a simple Enum Class

<?php

namespace App\Enums;

enum Gender: string
{
    case MALE = 'M';
    case FEMALE = 'F';
}

Then get back to the command

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use App\Enums\Gender;
use Illuminate\Console\Command;

class MagicTrick extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'magic:run';

    protected $description = 'Show a magic trick';

    public function handle()
    {
        $this->info('Male Enum value: ' . Gender::MALE->value);
    }
}

Then when we run we will get Male Enum value: M.

What will happen if we remove use App\Enums\Gender;

We will get an error Class "App\Console\Commands\Gender" not found

So if we want to use a magic here simply we can use a simple PHP function class_alias()

class_alias('App\Enums\Gender', 'Gender');

You can simply put the above snippet into your service provider to use the alias anywhere in your project

Your final code in command will be:

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\Command;

class MagicTrick extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'magic:run';

    protected $description = 'Show a magic trick';

    public function handle()
    {
        $this->info('Male Enum value: ' . \Gender::MALE->value);
    }
}

Finally you can check the following link of Mohamed Said to learn more about Laravel magic tricks
Laravel Magic Tricks