Laravel includes a variety of global “helper” PHP functions. Many of these functions are used by the framework itself; however, you are free to use them in your own applications if you find them convenient.

In this article, we are going to learn how to make custom helper in Laravel. We can define many custom functions in the helper and can use those functions in anywhere we want.

Let’s follow these steps to create a custom helper:

Table of Contents

1. Create helpers.php File
2. Define helpers in composer.json
3. Use in Controller
4. Use in Blade File

Step 1 : Create helpers.php File

Navigate to app/Http folder and create a file called “helpers.php‘. Open the file. Let’s create a simple function to get a specific user data.

<?php

function getUserData($id)
{
    $data = DB::table('users')
        ->where('id', $id)
        ->first();

    return array('response' => true, 'data' => $data);
}

Step 2 : Define helpers in composer.json

Open the composer.json file and in the autoload section we need to define the location of helpers.php. Here’s the example:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/"
    },
    "classmap": [
        "database/seeds",
        "database/factories"
    ],
    "files": [
        "app/Http/helpers.php"
    ]
},

After adding the helpers.php, run this command to load the file globally in our project:

composer dump-autoload

Step 3 : Use in Controller

We have created the custom helper. Let’s call it in a controller.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Response;

class TestController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        $user_id = Auth::user()->id;
        $user = getUserData($user_id);
        return Response::json($user);
    }
}

If we visit this route, the output will look like:

Step 4 : Use in Blade File

Like controller, we can also use helper in blade file. Here’s an example:

@extends('layouts.app')

@section('content')

<?php
$user = getUserData(Auth::user()->id);
dd($user);
?>

@endsection

We have created and tested custom helper. Thank you.