Alternative ways of doing the same things in Laravel

Laravel is a large framework, with contributions coming from almost 2000 developers worldwide. Over its 10 year journey, there have been additions to the framework to do the same thing, only shorter. In this post, I have highlighted some alternative ways of doing the same things in Laravel.

• How to get the authenticated users id
• How to clear cache in Laravel
• Return a route view
• PHP isset function

Get the authenticated users id in Laravel

There are a number of different ways of retrieving the authenticated user’s id in Laravel. Below are some of the most common ones.

auth()->user()->id

or

\Auth::user()->id

or you can use the shorter way

auth()->id()

How to clear cache in Laravel

Laravel provides a few commands to clear cache files from the filesystem. The commands below each target a different cache:

php artisan cache:clear

php artisan config:clear

php artisan route:clear

But did you know you can clear all caches with one command!

php artisan optimize:clear

Route views in Laravel

I have seen this a number of times in projects I have either inherited or projects I have helped junior developers with. Routes that call a controller method, but only call a static view. There is a simpler way of doing this, and it’s been there since Laravel 5.5 which was released in 2017!

Route::view('/', 'front.pages.home.index')->name('website-home');

Do you know of an alternative way of doing something in Laravel? Share it below!

PHP isset function

This isn’t strictly related to Laravel. In PHP isset function determines if a variable is declared and different than null. The isset function supports multiple variables.

if(isset($var1) && isset($var2)) {
    // variables are declared
}

A cleaner solution would be:

if(isset($var1, $var2)) {
    // variables are declared
}