Service Providers

    Service providers are the central place of all Laravel application bootstrapping. Your own application, as well as all of Laravel's core services are bootstrapped via service providers.

    But, what do we mean by "bootstrapped"? In general, we mean registering things, including registering service container bindings, event listeners, filters, and even routes. Service providers are the central place to configure your application.

    If you open the file included with Laravel, you will see a providers array. These are all of the service provider classes that will be loaded for your application. Of course, many of them are "deferred" providers, meaning they will not be loaded on every request, but only when the services they provide are actually needed.

    In this overview you will learn how to write your own service providers and register them with your Laravel application.

    The Artisan CLI can easily generate a new provider via the make:provider command:

    Now, let's take a look at a basic service provider:

    1. <?php namespace App\Providers;
    3. use Riak\Connection;
    4. use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
    6. class RiakServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider {
    8.     /**
    9.      * Register bindings in the container.
    10.      *
    11.      * @return void
    12.      */
    13.     public function register()
    14.     {
    15.         {
    16.             return new Connection($app['config']['riak']);
    17.         });
    18.     }

    This service provider only defines a register method, and uses that method to define an implementation of Riak\Contracts\Connection in the service container. If you don't understand how the service container works, don't worry, .

    This class is namespaced under App\Providers since that is the default location for service providers in Laravel. However, you are free to change this as you wish. Your service providers may be placed anywhere that Composer can autoload them.

    The Boot Method

    So, what if we need to register an event listener within our service provider? This should be done within the boot method. This method is called after all other service providers have been registered, meaning you have access to all other services that have been registered by the framework.

    1. use Illuminate\Contracts\Events\Dispatcher;
    3. public function boot(Dispatcher $events)
    4. {
    5.     $events->listen('SomeEvent', 'SomeEventHandler');
    6. }

    All service providers are registered in the config/app.php configuration file. This file contains a providers array where you can list the names of your service providers. By default, a set of Laravel core service providers are listed in this array. These providers bootstrap the core Laravel components, such as the mailer, queue, cache, and others.

    To register your provider, simply add it to the array:

    If your provider is only registering bindings in the , you may choose to defer its registration until one of the registered bindings is actually needed. Deferring the loading of such a provider will improve the performance of your application, since it is not loaded from the filesystem on every request.

    1. <?php namespace App\Providers;
    3. use Riak\Connection;
    4. use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
    6. class RiakServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider {
    8.     /**
    9.      * Indicates if loading of the provider is deferred.
    11.      * @var bool
    12.      */
    14.     /**
    15.      * Register the service provider.
    16.      *
    17.      * @return void
    18.      */
    19.     public function register()
    20.     {
    21.         $this->app->singleton('Riak\Contracts\Connection', function($app)
    22.         {
    23.             return new Connection($app['config']['riak']);
    24.         });
    25.     }
    27.     /**
    28.      * Get the services provided by the provider.
    29.      *
    30.      * @return array
    31.      */
    32.     public function provides()
    33.     {
    34.         return ['Riak\Contracts\Connection'];
    35.     }

    Laravel compiles and stores a list of all of the services supplied by deferred service providers, along with the name of its service provider class. Then, only when you attempt to resolve one of these services does Laravel load the service provider.