Laravel add http to urls

Question

Is there a helper in Laravel 5.0 that automatically adds http to a url without it? This is similar to codeigniter\'s prep_url that could be found here.

Answer 1

No but you can add it yourself. In your composer.json file add a files key under autoload and point it your helper file e.g.

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

Then create app/helpers.php with the code (lifted from https://github.com/bcit-ci/CodeIgniter/blob/master/system/helpers/url_helper.php):

Now you have prep_url globally accessible! Don't forget to run a composer dump-autoload too.