Extending or customizing laravel core bindings

Varun Pujari
codeburst
Published in
2 min readMay 25, 2019

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Photo by Dan Magatti on Unsplash

Do you wonder how laravel hands over the request to you when you type-hint the Request in controller argument. It’s can do this because the request instance is bound in app container with key request. In the same way there are other things like auth, response etc which are bound in the app container.

In this post we will look at how we can extend laravel core bindings and add custom method on core AuthManager class.

Whenever you use auth() helper function or Auth facade. What laravel does is it pulls out AuthManager from service container with key auth and hands over to us.

Now, let’s extends the core AuthManager and add a isAdmin function to it which determines if the current user is admin or not.

If you remember macros from this post, you might be thinking why not add a marco to Auth. Unfortunately we cannot do that because AuthManager doesn’t use Macroable trait. It has it’s own implementation of __call magic method to call non existing methods on auth driver.

Before we start lets add isAdmin function to User modal which will tell us if that user is admin or not.

public function isAdmin() {
return $this->id == 1;
}

For example purpose we will make a user admin if his id is 1. In real, what you should do instead is check if user has a admin role or something like that.

Now, Let’s create a Auth folder in app and then create AuthManager.php file. Paste the below code in it.

AuthManger.php

First, we receive auth and app in our constructor arguments. Assign the auth instance to member variable auth and invoke the parent constructor passing app.

And finally add our isAdmin method which check if user is logged in and call isAdmin on user.

Extending

Everything is setup, the only thing left to do is tell laravel to use our custom AuthManager instead of core one. We will do that is register method of AuthServiceProvider

public function register(){    $this->app->extend('auth', function($auth, $app) {

return new \App\Auth\AuthManager($auth, $app);
});
}

Let’s test

We’ll test this in 3 cases.

  • When user is not logged in.
  • When admin user is logged in.
  • When non-admin user is logged in.

I assume that you have database setup and seeded some data in users table

Here are our tests

Run tests

We run the tests

We get green

I hope you got to learn something new today. Feel free to reach out me for any questions.

Thank you.

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