Modular Structure in Laravel 5(.1)

The codes below were tested  also with L5.1

 Due to my user habits which  come from my old framework (Codeigniter), First off I had started to seek how I can implement a modular structure onto my Laravel 5 installation.


The codes below were tested  also with L5.1

You may be interested in my other article focused on implementing ACL mechanism into Laravel. Click here!

 Due to my user habits which  come from my old framework (Codeigniter), First off I had started to seek how I can implement a modular structure onto my Laravel 5 installation.

Along days, at both Stackoverflow and Laravel's own forum (laravel.io), I asked to many people, unfortunately I could not take a handy answer.  Finally, I solved it using a few tricks and now I am gonna share them with you.

The most important point than everything else is that  the tricks serve you a solution which is stayed in your own Laravel installation, no need to install 3rd party packages.

Let me convey how you can do this:

1) We can add our module path into composer.json` psr-4  and autoload section, such as below:


Note that, I consider app/modules directory as my module path, you can change it.

2) Create a  config php for our modules by naming it as module.php and populate it  in your config directory locates in app directory.  Please note, I am using five modules in my project, you can increase or decrease it.

3) Create directory structure corresponds to our declaration which we inform system about it in app/config/module.php. In other words, you should create your module directories in app/modules directory. Each of them has a Controllers, Views directory and a routes.php file. I will share details at next steps. End of it, your directory structure sould look like below:

4) Create a ServiceProvider to load our modules onto the system.


And don't forget to add our ServiceProvider  among the other service providers` declaration.

How will this provider affect the system? As declared at the Laravel Documentation, Service providers are central place of Laravel Application. Even Laravel`s own and Laravel` core services are bootstraped via service providers. In the boot method of our service provider, we load our modules from app/config/module.php file, modules` routes and declare each module` view path if they exist at file system. We have left blank content of register() method. So, why did we write it?

Because the ServiceProvider forces us to put register() method in our extended provider when we implement a class from it. For more details please look at Laravel Documentation

5) And now, we can fill routes.php file which each module has.

Please note, you should change the parameters of route according to module what you create routes.php for. I prepared this routes.php example for only Admin module.

About Module`s Views

The most confusing point in the articles explain how we can implement modular structure onto our Laravel installation is views!

You might have noticed that  we already declared  our view path  for each module to system by ServiceProvider.

We can use our module` views easily like below:

Conclusion and last suggestion

I am really glad to convey you how you can implement modular structure onto your Laravel installation without you have to need any 3rd party solution.

After these all operations, it would be, if you run composer dump-autoload -o command when you're at your project directory. 

Feel free to leave a comment about this solution :)