Adding routes to laravel via plugins

Question

I am working on designing a specific web framework that allows our team to add new components as plugins, then allowing customers to add these plugins or modules using a control panel. With CodeIgniter things were easy , just copy the controller into the controllers folder and the client-side module will find its way via the URL app/index.php/module/function But Laravel doesn't allow such dynamic routing.

Is there anyway to extend the route configuration without editing the routes.php by hand ?

Answer 1

You can simply add any routes you want in your service provider's 'boot' method:

public function boot()
{
    $this->app['router']->get('my-route', 'MyVendor\Mypackage\MyController@action');
}

If you want to have a kind of automatic prefix, that doesn't happen automatically, but it's not too hard to create one:

public function boot()
{
    $this->app['router']->group(['prefix' => 'my-module'], function ($router) {
         $router->get('my-route', 'MyVendor\MyPackage\MyController@action');
         $router->get('my-second-route', 'MyVendor\MyPackage\MyController@otherAction');
    });
}

A lot of people will have this prefix as a config variable so that developers can choose the prefix they want (if you do this remember to name your routes so you can refer to them easily):

public function boot()
{
    $this->app['router']->group(['prefix' => \Config::get('my-package::prefix')], function ($router) {
         $router->get('my-route', 'MyVendor\MyPackage\MyController@action');
         $router->get('my-second-route', 'MyVendor\MyPackage\MyController@otherAction');
    });
}

Answer 2

I know I'm bit late but in Laravel 5.4 we can achieve something like this:

Step 1 Create your package and create service provider in it.

Step 2 Register your package service provider in laravel config app.

Step 3 Now create a sperate routes service provider which will contain following

namespace MyPackage\Providers;


use App\Providers\RouteServiceProvider;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

class MyPackageRouteServiceProvider extends RouteServiceProvider
{
    protected $namespace='MyPackage\Controllers';

    public function boot()
    {
        parent::boot();
    }

    public function map()
    {
        $this->mapApiRoutes();

        $this->mapWebRoutes();
    }


    protected function mapApiRoutes()
    {
        Route::prefix('Mypackage\api')
            ->middleware('api')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->group(__DIR__ . '\..\Routes\api.php');
    }

    protected function mapWebRoutes()
    {
        Route::prefix('Mypackage')
            ->middleware('web')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->group(__DIR__ . '\..\Routes\web.php');
    }
}

Note: I'm considering there is Routes Folder and contain web.php and api.php file. According to your question you want to load it dynamically you can have a constructor function and pass the package name, prefix and namespace as per your ease.

Step 4 Now the final step is registering the service provider you can call something like this in your package service provider:

public function boot()
{
    $this->app->register('Mypackage\Providers\MyPackageRouteServiceProvider');
}

Hope this helps. Cheers