Laravel real-time Facades

What are Facades

Before understanding Real-time Facades, it would be helpful to have a basic knowledge of Facades. What are Facades in Laravel, and how are they used?

A Facade is a "static" interface for a class. In other words, it allows you to call methods from a class statically. Here's an example of the Route Facade Class that we know and love:

Route::get('/facades', function() {
    echo "The Route Class is a Facade";
});

Creating a Facade

It's even more helpful if you see an example of how we can create a new Facade in Laravel. If we are working with a new Laravel app, we could make two new classes inside our app\Facades folder.

Greeting.php:

namespace App\Facades;

class Greeting
{
    public function sayHello()
    {
        return 'Hello Facades!';
    }
}

MyFacade.php:

namespace App\Facades;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade;

class MyFacade extends Facade
{
    /**
     * Get the registered name of the component.
     *
     * @return string
     */
    protected static function getFacadeAccessor()
    {
        return 'myfacade';
    }
}

Next, we can add the following code to our routes/web.php:

use App\Facades\MyFacade;

app()->bind('myfacade', function () {
    return new \App\Facades\Greeting();
});

Route::get('/', function () {
    echo MyFacade::sayHello();
});

If we visit the homepage of our application, we'll see that the screen displays Hello Facades!. So, now you can see that we can call our class via our Facade interface, and we don't have to do this:

Route::get('/', function() {
    $greeting = new App\Facades\Greeting;
    $greeting->sayHello();
});

Instead of creating a new instance of that object, we can instead use our Facade interface to call our methods.

Real-Time Facades

Real-Time Facades are even easier to use. You can add the word Facades to the beginning of your namespace, and it will turn that class into a Facade. Here is a quick example.

Say that we have another blank Laravel application, and we created a new class at app\Greeting.php with the following contents:

namespace App;

class Greeting
{
    public function sayHello()
    {
        return 'Real-Time Facades are Amazing!';
    }
}

Inside of our routes/web.php, let's modify it to look like this:

use Facades\App\Greeting;

Route::get('/', function () {
    echo Greeting::sayHello();
});

If we were to visit the homepage of our application, we would now get the message, "Real-Time Facades are Amazing!".

That's how simple it is to create a Real-Time Facade using Laravel. Real-Time Facades can come in handy, and they can make your code look a lot cleaner, so make sure to use them the next time you need to call a method statically.