When developing a website with Laravel, sometime we need to create a custom helper function that can be called anywhere in our code. For example, we can make a function that returns our site title.
function site_title() {
return 'Something';
}
And calling it in our blade template.
<head>
<title>{{ site_title() }}</title>
</head>
In order to be able do that, we’ll be using files autoloading feature in composer. So, first we need to create a php file that contains our custom function. Let’s call it helpers.php. We can put it in any folder we like, I personally like to put it in the app folder. And then, in our composer.json add this property in the autoload section.
"files": [ "app/helpers.php" ]
It should become like this :
"autoload": {
"classmap": [
"database"
],
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "app/"
},
"files": [
"app/helpers.php"
]
},
Lastly, run composer dump-autoload in your terminal and you are good to go. Keep in mind that your functions will become a global functions, so be wise when naming your functions. I always use prefix in all my global functions to avoid name collision with the php or laravel functions.