Question

What are facades?

Answer 1

Facades are a way to register your class and its methods in Laravel Container so they are available in your whole application after getting resolved by Reflection.

The main benefit of using facades is we don’t have to remember long class names and also don’t need to require those classes in any other class for using them. It also gives more testability to the application.

The below image could help you understand why Facades are used for:

Facades Vs. Dependency Injection

One of the primary benefits of dependency injection is the ability to swap implementations of the injected class. This is useful during testing since you can inject a mock or stub and assert that various methods were called on the stub.

Typically, it would not be possible to mock or stub a truly static class method. However, since facades use dynamic methods to proxy method calls to objects resolved from the service container, we actually can test facades just as we would test an injected class instance. For example, given the following route:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

Route::get('/cache', function () {
    return Cache::get('key');
});

Using Laravel's facade testing methods, we can write the following test to verify that the Cache::get method was called with the argument we expected:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

/**
 * A basic functional test example.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function testBasicExample()
{
    Cache::shouldReceive('get')
         ->with('key')
         ->andReturn('value');

    $response = $this->get('/cache');

    $response->assertSee('value');
}

Facade Class Reference

Laravel ships with many Facades. The following table show the in-built Facade class references −

Facade	Class	Service Container Binding
App	Illuminate\Foundation\Application	app
Artisan	Illuminate\Contracts\Console\Kernel	artisan
Auth	Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager	auth
Auth (Instance)	Illuminate\Auth\Guard
Blade	Illuminate\View\Compilers\BladeCompiler	blade.compiler
Bus	Illuminate\Contracts\Bus\Dispatcher
Cache	Illuminate\Cache\Repository	cache
Config	Illuminate\Config\Repository	config
Cookie	Illuminate\Cookie\CookieJar	cookie
Crypt	Illuminate\Encryption\Encrypter	encrypter
DB	Illuminate\Database\DatabaseManager	db
DB (Instance)	Illuminate\Database\Connection
Event	Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher	events
File	Illuminate\Filesystem\Filesystem	files
Gate	Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Access\Gate
Hash	Illuminate\Contracts\Hashing\Hasher	hash
Input	Illuminate\Http\Request	request
Lang	Illuminate\Translation\Translator	translator
Log	Illuminate\Log\Writer	log
Mail	Illuminate\Mail\Mailer	mailer
Password	Illuminate\Auth\Passwords\PasswordBroker	auth.password
Queue	Illuminate\Queue\QueueManager	queue
Queue (Instance)	Illuminate\Queue\QueueInterface
Queue (Base Class)	Illuminate\Queue\Queue
Redirect	Illuminate\Routing\Redirector	redirect
Redis	Illuminate\Redis\Database	redis
Request	Illuminate\Http\Request	request
Response	Illuminate\Contracts\Routing\ResponseFactory
Route	Illuminate\Routing\Router	router
Schema	Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint
Session	Illuminate\Session\SessionManager	session
Session (Instance)	Illuminate\Session\Store
Storage	Illuminate\Contracts\Filesystem\Factory	filesystem
URL	Illuminate\Routing\UrlGenerator	url
Validator	Illuminate\Validation\Factory	validator
Validator (Instance)	Illuminate\Validation\Validator
View	Illuminate\View\Factory	view
View (Instance)	Illuminate\View\View