Tanner's Blog

The Laravel framework comes with some very efficient tools via artisan for quickly scaffolding out new files and classes. This can very useful for making models and building them with default Factories, Seeders, and Migration files all within a single command.

$ php artisan make:model Podcast -f -s -m

However, that is the default Laravel can build... What if you want to create other files that are not within the artisan command scope?

Well you can create customize Laravel artisan commands that extend the GeneratorCommand class and build out what you need!

First thing is to set up a stub folder, which is common across your existing Laravel application. You might see if you run:

$ php artisan stub:publish

Which will copy all the default Laravel stub files allow you to make additional customizations.

So lets setup that up. By creating a folder called stubs which will be an easy place to store all of our custom generator template files.

$ mkdir stubs

Next let's create and edit a very simple file that we'd like artisan to quickly build out for us.

$ touch stubs/service.stub

And fill with the following content:

<?php

namespace App\Services;

class {{service_name}}
{
    // Build out service class
}

Take notice of {{service_name}} which might resemble some FE/JS templating languages like blade and vue, but this is for doing a string replace later on.

Now lets create a new file within our app/Console/Commands directory:

<?php

namespace App\Console\Commands;

use Illuminate\Console\GeneratorCommand;

class MakeService extends GeneratorCommand
{
    /**
     * The name and signature of the console command.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $signature = 'make:service {name}';

    /**
     * The console command description.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $description = 'Create a new Service.';

    protected $type = 'Service';

    protected function getStub()
    {
        return base_path('stubs/service.stub');
    }

    protected function getDefaultNamespace($rootNamespace)
    {
        return $rootNamespace . '\Services';
    }

    protected function replaceClass($stub, $name)
    {
        $class = str_replace($this->getNamespace($name) . '\\', '', $name);

        // Do string replacement
        return str_replace('{{service_name}}', $class, $stub);
    }
}

This file will extend the GeneratorCommand class that exists with Laravel allowing to use some existing methods to make creating files from stubs very simple.

With your command created its very simple to use artisan just as efficiently to build Service classes out!

$ php artisan make:service PodcastService