Eloquent event is not firing

Question

I want to set the password when it changes in my User model. So I'm using boot method of the model:

<?php
namespace App\Model;

class User extends \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model
{
    protected $table = 'users';

    public static function boot()
    {
        //die('here'); // this happens
        User::saving(function ($user) {
            //die('here'); // this doesn't happen
            if ($user->isDirty('password')) {
                $user->password = // hash password...
            }
        });
    }
}

I'm using the save() method on the model to create the entry in the data base, apparently this should fire the creating event. I've emptied the database table to ensure that a new row is being creating (it is), this event does not fire - and my password is raw un-ecrypted. By the way, I'm using illuminate/database ^5.2 in my app (not Laravel).

UPDATE - capsule initialization

$capsule = new Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager;
$capsule->addConnection([
    'driver' => 'mysql',
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'charset' => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix' => '',
    'database' => 'mydb',
    'username' => 'myuser',
    'password' => 'mypass',
]);
$capsule->bootEloquent();

Answer 1

If you want your events to work, you need to setup an event dispatcher for the capsule.

First, you will need to add illuminate/events to your dependencies. Add "illuminate/events": "5.2.*" to your composer.json file:

"require": {
    // other requires...
    "illuminate/events": "5.2.*"
},

Next, you'll need to setup the event dispatcher on the capsule. Make sure you do this before your call to bootEloquent(). From the docs:

// new capsule...

// add connection...

// Set the event dispatcher used by Eloquent models... (optional)
use Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher;
use Illuminate\Container\Container;
$capsule->setEventDispatcher(new Dispatcher(new Container));

// Setup the Eloquent ORM... (optional; unless you've used setEventDispatcher())
$capsule->bootEloquent();

Now you should be good to go.

While not related, I also wanted to point out that your boot method should make sure to call parent::boot(); before it does anything else (like setting up events).

---

Optional solution

If this is the only thing you're trying to do with the events, you can skip this altogether by setting up a mutator function for your password attribute. The mutator method will be called any time you assign a value to the mutated attribute (i.e. $user->password = "hello").

To do this, just add the following function to your User model:

public function setPasswordAttribute($value) {
    $this->attributes['password'] = bcrypt($value);
}