Best Practices for Laravel 4 Helpers and Basic Functions?

Question

I\'m trying to understand the best place to put a global function in Laravel 4. For example, date formatting. I don\'t think making a facade is worth it as facades are too m

Answer 1

Laravel's helpers.php method is to add it to your "files" in composer.json (https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/master/composer.json):

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        ...
    ],
    "files": [
        "app/libraries/helpers.php"
    ],
},

What I do is to create small classes (a few methods per class, one line per method, everything extended from something and DRY, that's my goal),

class ExtendedCarbon extends Carbon\Carbon {

    public function formatDDMMAAAA($date)
    {
        /// format and return
    }

}

save them to them in app/libraries and add to composer.json:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        ...
        "app/libraries",
        ...
    ],
},

Execute

composer dump

And then just use them wherever you need

$formatted = (new ExtendedCarbon)->formatDDMMAAAA($date);

Watch this video about refactoring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC-pQPq0acs

By the way, I'm kind of sure it was just an example, but you might not need a helper to format dates, since all dates in Laravel are instances of Carbon (https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon) and it has loads of methods to format date and time.