Best Practices for Custom Helpers in Laravel 5

I would like to create helper functions to avoid repeating code between views in Laravel 5:

view.blade.php

<p>Foo Formated text: {{ fooFormatText($text) }}</p>

They’re basically text formatting functions. Where and how can I create a file with these functions?

Answer

Create a helpers.php file in your app folder and load it up with composer:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        ...
    ],
    "psr-4": {
        "App\": "app/"
    },
    "files": [
        "app/helpers.php" // <---- ADD THIS
    ]
},

After adding that to your composer.json file, run the following command:

composer dump-autoload

---

If you don’t like keeping your helpers.php file in your app directory (because it’s not a PSR-4 namespaced class file), you can do what the laravel.com website does: store the helpers.php in the bootstrap directory. Remember to set it in your composer.json file:

"files": [
    "bootstrap/helpers.php"
]

---

Tip: If you want to use the different file name instead of helpers, you can change the file name and path. Also, you can create multiple helper files. It will look like this:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        ...
    ],
    "psr-4": {
        "App\": "app/"
    },
    "files": [
        "app/Helpers/base.php", // <---- ADD THIS
        "app/Helpers/metrics.php" // <---- Create `metrics.php` file in this path and add the path in composer.json file.
    ]
},