Facades

Facades

• Introduction
• When To Use Facades
  • Facades Vs. Dependency Injection
  • Facades Vs. Helper Functions
• How Facades Work
• Facade Class Reference

Introduction

Facades provide a "static" interface to classes that are available in the application's service container. Laravel ships with many facades which provide access to almost all of Laravel's features. Laravel facades serve as "static proxies" to underlying classes in the service container, providing the benefit of a terse, expressive syntax while maintaining more testability and flexibility than traditional static methods.

All of Laravel's facades are defined in the Illuminate\Support\Facades namespace. So, we can easily access a facade like so:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

Route::get('/cache', function () {
    return Cache::get('key');
});

Throughout the Laravel documentation, many of the examples will use facades to demonstrate various features of the framework.

When To Use Facades

Facades have many benefits. They provide a terse, memorable syntax that allows you to use Laravel's features without remembering long class names that must be injected or configured manually. Furthermore, because of their unique usage of PHP's dynamic methods, they are easy to test.

However, some care must be taken when using facades. The primary danger of facades is class scope creep. Since facades are so easy to use and do not require injection, it can be easy to let your classes continue to grow and use many facades in a single class. Using dependency injection, this potential is mitigated by the visual feedback a large constructor gives you that your class is growing too large. So, when using facades, pay special attention to the size of your class so that its scope of responsibility stays narrow.

When building a third-party package that interacts with Laravel, it's better to inject Laravel contracts instead of using facades. Since packages are built outside of Laravel itself, you will not have access to Laravel's facade testing helpers.