Is it possible to use Laravel components in a WordPress plugin?

Question

I need to write a rather complex plugin for WordPress and I would like to use the Laravel framework components for a lot of the grunt work. Is it possible to use the Laravel components without using the whole Laravel framework?

I'm particularly interested in using its ORM.

Answer 1

Yes, you can. because

Laravel 4 uses Composer for dependency management as the framework itself depends on a number of external packages to function correctly. Each of the components used by Laravel 4 is available individually on the Illuminate GitHub repository. Laravel 4 ties together the Illuminate components to create the framework.

So, for example, if you want to use Illuminate Database component you have to create a new "Capsule" manager instance. Capsule aims to make configuring the library for usage outside of the Laravel framework as easy as possible.

use Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager as Capsule;

$capsule = new Capsule;

$capsule->addConnection([
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => 'localhost',
    'database'  => 'database',
    'username'  => 'root',
    'password'  => 'password',
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => '',
]);

Once the Capsule instance has been registered. You may use it like so: (Using The Query Builder)

$users = Capsule::table('users')->where('votes', '>', 100)->get();

For full component list visit this link. Also, you can find details about a component on Laravel site.

Update : Also make sure that you have these in your server because Laravel-4 requires these.

PHP >= 5.3.7
MCrypt PHP Extension

You can also take a look at Symfony Components, Laravel itself uses these components in it's core components.