How to Include Custom Functions and Libraries in Laravel

Using Custom Functions or Libraries in Laravel

When working with Laravel, it’s common to reuse certain functions or libraries across your application. To improve maintainability and promote clean, reusable code, it's useful to know how to integrate your own custom logic into a Laravel project.

Create Custom Function or Class Files

It’s a good practice to organize your custom code in a dedicated directory, such as app/Custom. Inside this folder, you might create:

• functions.php: to hold globally used functions
• CustomClass.php: to define your own PHP classes

Include Custom Functions

To include custom functions in Laravel, edit the register() method in app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php and add:

public function register()
{
    require_once app_path('Custom/functions.php');
}

This ensures your function file is loaded each time Laravel boots up.

Set Up Composer Autoload for Custom Libraries

To autoload your classes using Composer, modify the autoload section of composer.json like this:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Custom\\": "app/Custom/"
    }
},

Then, regenerate the autoload files by running the following command:

composer dump-autoload

Using Custom Classes

Once configured, you can use your custom classes throughout your application like this:

use Custom\CustomClass;

$customInstance = new CustomClass();

Make sure the class file uses the correct namespace to match its folder path:

namespace Custom;

class CustomClass {
    // Class logic
}

Using Custom Functions in Blade Templates

If you want to use custom functions in Blade views, you can define a custom Blade directive in the boot() method of your service provider:

public function boot()
{
    Blade::directive('customFunction', function ($expression) {
        return "<?php echo custom_function($expression); ?>";
    });
}

Now you can call your custom function in Blade using the following syntax:

@customFunction('example')

This helps keep your view files clean and extends the flexibility of your Blade templates.

Conclusion

This guide demonstrated how to include custom functions and libraries in a Laravel project. Whether through manual inclusion or Composer autoloading, these techniques enable more structured, reusable, and maintainable code in Laravel development.