laravel - Manage settings in an application

Question

Mine is a self-taught question, I would like to better understand how to best deal with the settings of an application in Laravel.

Assuming you have a table "Settings":

option	value
site_name	Example_name
site_description	Example_description

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65835586/manage-settings-in-an-application

Answer 1

If you want to use out-of-the-box Laravel you can create a model to assist you with that. In order for you to create a model, you can run php artisan make:model Setting or you can create a model manually. Below is an example which you should place in a new file (Setting.php) in the /App/Models directory.

<?php
            
namespace AppModels;
            
use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;
            
class Setting extends Model
{

   /**
   * The table associated with the model.
   *
   * @var string
   */
   protected $table = 'Settings';

   /**
   * The primary key associated with the table.
   *
   * @var string
   */
   protected $primaryKey = 'option';

   /**
   * Indicates if the model's ID is auto-incrementing.
   *
   * @var bool
   */
   public $incrementing = false;

   /**
   * The data type of the auto-incrementing ID.
   *
   * @var string
   */
   protected $keyType = 'string';

   /**
   * The attributes that are mass assignable.
   *
   * @var array
   */
   protected $fillable = ['option', 'value'];

}

You can then create a controller by running the following command: php artisan make:controller SettingController --resource --model=Setting. The command will automatically create a resource controller for the Setting model based on the Laravel documentation.

In your controller, you can request a certain value of one of your settings by using the following code:

// Retrieve a model by its primary key...
$site_name = Setting::find('site_name')->value;

Or you can request all settings listed in your database by using this line:

// Retrieve all settings
$settings = Setting::all();

You can further process the settings with code like this:

// Create a list of all options and associated values
foreach ($settings as $setting) {
   echo $setting->option . ": " . $setting->value;
}

You can find way more information about Laravel models in the documentation and online. I haven't tested the codes but they should work.

Update all options

If you want to update all options you should create a HTML form like this one:

<form action="{{ route('setting.update') }}" method="POST">
   @csrf
   @method('PUT')
   @foreach ($settings as $setting)
      <label>{{ $setting->option }}</label>
      <input type="text" name="{{ $setting->option }}" value="{{ $setting->value }}"/>
   @endforeach
   <input type="submit">
</form>

In your update() function in your controller you can then update all values by using the following code:

public function update(Request $request)
{
   $settings = Setting::update($request->all());
}

I'm not sure if the update will work correctly with the code above so please let me know :)