Thin Controllers in Laravel 4 - php

Question

I am trying to work out the 'best' way of structuring my controllers/models in a new Laravel 4 app.
Obviously I want to keep the controllers thin and lightweight. So I want to work with Repos/Services to separate things, however I don't really know how to implement this in Laravel 4. Laravel 3 gave us some idea of how this should work, but no samples.
Has any one figured out the neatest way to do this, or have any sample code I could take a peek at?

Answer 1

I agree on the fact that it isn't very clear where to store these classes in Laravel 4.
A simple solution would be creating repositories/services folders in your main app/ folder and updating your main composer.json file to have them autoloaded:
{
"require": {
"laravel/framework": "4.0.*"
},
"autoload": {
"classmap": [
"app/commands",
"app/controllers",
"app/models",
"app/database/migrations",
"app/tests/TestCase.php",
"app/repositories",
"app/services"
]
},
"minimum-stability": "dev"
}
Note: everytime you create a new class you have to run composer dump-autoload.
In case of repositories, you can have Laravel inject them into your controllers automatically. I find this a good screencast on this subject.

Answer 2

I found this collection of tutorials to be a great introduction on the proper place to store your custom service providers and other files that you want to inject into your project:
http://fideloper.com/laravel-4-application-setup-app-library-autoloading
http://fideloper.com/laravel-4-where-to-put-bindings
http://fideloper.com/error-handling-with-content-negotiation
These tutorials come from this collection:
http://fideloper.com/tag/laravel-4

Answer 3

The first thing that I do when I get a fresh install of Laravel is:
Remove the "models" folder
Create a src folder
Under the src, create a Application folder (or the name of the app)
On Application folder, create Entities, Repositories, Services and Tests
So, in this case your namespace will be Application\Entities, Application\Repositories and Application\Services
In composer.json:
{
"require": {
"laravel/framework": "4.0.*"
},
"autoload": {
"psr-0": {
"Application": "app/src/"
},
"classmap": [
"app/commands",
"app/controllers",
"app/database/migrations",
]
},
"minimum-stability": "dev"
}
To each one of those you'll need to create the classes and a service provider to bind a repository to an entity.
Here is a tutorial explaining how to create the repositories:
http://culttt.com/2013/07/08/creating-flexible-controllers-in-laravel-4-using-repositories/
Anyway, I'm still looking for the best architecture. If anyone has a better idea, I'll be glad to hear it!