Service Providers

Service Providers

• Introduction
• Writing Service Providers
  • The Register Method
  • The Boot Method
• Registering Providers
• Deferred Providers

Introduction

Service providers are the central place of all Laravel application bootstrapping. Your own application, as well as all of Laravel's core services are bootstrapped via service providers.

But, what do we mean by "bootstrapped"? In general, we mean registering things, including registering service container bindings, event listeners, middleware, and even routes. Service providers are the central place to configure your application.

If you open the config/app.php file included with Laravel, you will see a providers array. These are all of the service provider classes that will be loaded for your application. Of course, many of these are "deferred" providers, meaning they will not be loaded on every request, but only when the services they provide are actually needed.

In this overview you will learn how to write your own service providers and register them with your Laravel application.

Writing Service Providers

All service providers extend the Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider class. Most service providers contain a register and a boot method. Within the register method, you should only bind things into the service container. You should never attempt to register any event listeners, routes, or any other piece of functionality within the register method.

The Artisan CLI can generate a new provider via the make:provider command:

php artisan make:provider RiakServiceProvider