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Amit Merchant

Amit Merchant

A blog on PHP, JavaScript, and more

Artisan command to use model instance in controller actions in Laravel

Here’s a little tip about the artisan command that generates the controller. So, if you’ve used the make:controller command with the --resource option, it will generate controllers with create, read, update, and delete (“CRUD”) actions in them.

But here’s a thing. When you generate controllers using this command, the actions such as show, edit, update, and destroy will use the id of the resource for updating purposes.

For instance, if you generate UserController using this command, it will generate the controller with the following actions like so.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        //
    }

    public function create()
    {
        //
    }

    public function store(Request $request)
    {
        //
    }

    public function show($id)
    {
        //
    }

    public function edit($id)
    {
        //
    }

    public function update(Request $request, $id)
    {
        //
    }

    public function destroy($id)
    {
        //
    }
}

As you can see, some of the methods here are using $id to identify the resource.

But you might want to use a model instance instead of an id when using route model binding. What would you do in that case?

Using model instance in make:controller

If you want to use model instance instead of id when generating the controller, you can use the --model option with the make:controller by passing in the model name.

So, for instance, if we were to use the User model’s instance in the previous example, we can use the following command like so.

$ php artisan make:controller UserController --resource --model User

This will generate the UserController with the following content like so.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        //
    }

    public function create()
    {
        //
    }

    public function store(Request $request)
    {
        //
    }

    public function show(User $user)
    {
        //
    }

    public function edit(User $user)
    {
        //
    }

    public function update(Request $request, User $user)
    {
        //
    }

    public function destroy(User $user)
    {
        //
    }
}

As you can tell, the show, edit, update, and destroy methods are now being injecting with the App\Models\User model’s instance instead of an id.

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