Fast Workflow in Laravel With Custom Generators

This Laravel 4 package provides a variety of generators to speed up your development process. These generators include:

• generate:model
• generate:controller
• generate:seed
• generate:migration
• generate:resource

Installation

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

"require-dev": {
	"way/generators": "2.*"
}

Please note that version 2 of this package removed support for a few generators, such as generate:scaffold and generate:form. If you'd like to continue using those, stick with version 1.1.

Next, update Composer from the Terminal:

composer update --dev

Once this operation completes, the final step is to add the service provider. Open app/config/app.php, and add a new item to the providers array.

'Way\Generators\GeneratorsServiceProvider'

That's it! You're all set to go. Run the artisan command from the Terminal to see the new generate commands.

php artisan

There's also a Sublime Text plugin available to assist with the generators. Definitely use it, but not before you learn the syntax below.

Usage

Think of generators as an easy way to speed up your workflow. Rather than opening the models directory, creating a new file, saving it, and adding the class, you can simply run a single generate command.

• Migrations
• Models
• Seeds
• Resources

Migrations

Laravel 4 offers a migration generator, but it stops just short of creating the schema (or the fields for the table). Let's review a couple examples, using generate:migration.

php artisan generate:migration create_posts_table

If we don't specify the fields option, the following file will be created within app/database/migrations.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;

class CreatePostsTable extends Migration {

	/**
	 * Run the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function up()
	{
        Schema::create('posts', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
	}

	/**
	 * Reverse the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function down()
	{
	    Schema::drop('posts');
	}

}

Notice that the generator is smart enough to detect that you're trying to create a table. When naming your migrations, make them as descriptive as possible. The migration generator will detect the first word in your migration name and do its best to determine how to proceed. As such, for create_posts_table, the keyword is "create," which means that we should prepare the necessary schema to create a table.

If you instead use a migration name along the lines of add_user_id_to_posts_table, in that case, the keyword is "add," signaling that we intend to add rows to an existing table. Let's see what that generates.

php artisan generate:migration add_user_id_to_posts_table

This will prepare the following boilerplate:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;

class AddUserIdToPostsTable extends Migration {

	/**
	 * Run the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function up()
	{
        Schema::table('posts', function(Blueprint $table) {

        });
	}


	/**
	 * Reverse the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function down()
	{
	    Schema::table('posts', function(Blueprint $table) {

        });
	}

}

Notice how, this time, we're not doing Schema::create.

Keywords

When writing migration names, use the following keywords to provide hints for the generator.

• create or make (create_users_table)
• add or insert (add_user_id_to_posts_table)
• remove (remove_user_id_from_posts_table)
• delete or drop (delete_users_table)

Generating Schema

This is pretty nice, but let's take things a step further and also generate the schema, using the fields option.

php artisan generate:migration create_posts_table --fields="title:string, body:text"

Before we decipher this new option, let's see the output:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;

class CreatePostsTable extends Migration {

	/**
	 * Run the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function up()
	{
        Schema::create('posts', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('title');
			$table->text('body');
			$table->timestamps();
        });
	}

	/**
	 * Reverse the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function down()
	{
	    Schema::drop('posts');
	}

}

Nice! A few things to notice here:

• The generator will automatically set the id as the primary key.
• It parsed the fields options, and added those fields.
• The drop method is smart enough to realize that, in reverse, the table should be dropped entirely.

To declare fields, use a comma+space-separated list of key:value:option sets, where key is the name of the field, value is the column type, and option is a way to specify indexes and such, like unique or nullable. Here are some examples:

• --fields="first:string, last:string"
• --fields="age:integer, yob:date"
• --fields="username:string:unique, age:integer:nullable"
• --fields="name:string:default('John Doe'), bio:text:nullable"
• --fields="username:string(30):unique, age:integer:nullable:default(18)"

Please make note of the last example, where we specify a character limit: string(30). This will produce $table->string('username', 30)->unique();

It is possible to destroy the table by issuing:

php artisan generate:migration delete_posts_table

As a final demonstration, let's run a migration to remove the completed field from a tasks table.

php artisan generate:migration remove_completed_from_tasks_table --fields="completed:boolean"

This time, as we're using the "remove" keyword, the generator understands that it should drop a column, and add it back in the down() method.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;

class RemoveCompletedFromTasksTable extends Migration {

	/**
	 * Run the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function up()
	{
        Schema::table('tasks', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->dropColumn('completed');
        });
	}


	/**
	 * Reverse the migrations.
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function down()
	{
	    Schema::table('tasks', function(Blueprint $table) {
            $table->boolean('completed');
        });
	}

}

Models

php artisan generate:model Post

This will create the file, app/models/Post.php and insert the following boilerplate:

<?php

class Post extends \Eloquent {

}

Seeds

Laravel 4 provides us with a flexible way to seed new tables.

php artisan generate:seed users

Set the argument to the name of the table that you'd like a seed file for. This will generate app/database/seeds/UsersTableSeeder.php and populate it with:

<?php

// Composer: "fzaninotto/faker": "v1.3.0"
use Faker\Factory as Faker;

class UsersTableSeeder extends Seeder {

    public function run()
    {
        $faker = Faker::create();

        foreach(range(1, 10) as $index)
        {
            User::create([

            ]);
        }
    }

}

This will give you a basic bit of boilerplate, using the popular Faker library. This is a nice way to seed your DB tables. Don't forget to pull in Faker through Composer!

Resources

The generate:resource command will do a number of things for you:

• Generate a model
• Generate a controller
• Generate a migration with schema
• Generate a table seeder
• Migrate the database

When triggering this command, you'll be asked to confirm each of these actions. That way, you can tailor the generation to what you specifically require.

Example

Imagine that you need to build a way to display posts. While you could manually create a controller, create a model, create a migration and populate it with the schema, and then create a table seeder...why not let the generator do that?

php artisan generate:resource post --fields="title:string, body:text"

If you say yes to each confirmation, this single command will give you boilerplate for:

• app/models/Post.php
• app/controllers/PostsController.php
• app/database/migrations/timestamp-create_posts_table.php (including the schema)
• app/database/seeds/PostsTableSeeder.php

Configuration

You may want to modify your templates - how the generated files are formatted. To allow for this, you need to publish the templates that, behind the scenes, the generators will reference.

php artisan generate:publish-templates

This will copy all templates to your app/templates directory. You can modify these however you wish to fit your desired formatting. If you'd prefer a different directory:

php artisan generate:publish-templates --path=app/foo/bar/templates

Once finished, you'll need to tell the generators where your new templates are located. When you run the generate:publish-templates command, it will also publish the configuration to app/config/packages/way/generators/config/config.php. This file will look like:

<?php

return [

    /**
     * Where is the template for a model?
     */
    'model_template_path' => 'vendor/way/generators/src/Way/Generators/templates/model.txt',

    /**
     * Where do you put your models?
     */
    'model_target_path'   => app_path('models'),

    /**
     * Where is the template for a migration?
     */
    'migration_template_path' => 'vendor/way/generators/src/Way/Generators/templates/migration.txt',

    /**
     * Where do you put your migrations?
     */
    'migration_target_path'   => app_path('database/migrations'),

    /**
     * Where is the template for a database seeder?
     */
    'seed_template_path' => 'vendor/way/generators/src/Way/Generators/templates/seed.txt',

    /**
     * Where do you put your database table seeders?
     */
    'seed_target_path'   => app_path('database/seeds')

];

For any template that you modify, update its respective *_template_path value. For instance:

'model_template_path' => app_path('templates/model.txt')

Also, while you're in this file, note that you can also update the default target directory for each generator.