Laravel 5.5 URL Generation

Introduction

Laravel provides several helpers to assist you in generating URLs for your application. Of course, these are mainly helpful when building links in your templates and API responses, or when generating redirect responses to another part of your application.

The Basics

Generating Basic URLs

The url helper may be used to generate arbitrary URLs for your application. The generated URL will automatically use the scheme (HTTP or HTTPS) and host from the current request:

$post = App\Post::find(1);

echo url("/posts/{$post->id}");

// http://example.com/posts/1

Accessing The Current URL

If no path is provided to the url helper, a Illuminate\Routing\UrlGenerator instance is returned, allowing you to access information about the current URL:

// Get the current URL without the query string...
echo url()->current();

// Get the current URL including the query string...
echo url()->full();

// Get the full URL for the previous request...
echo url()->previous();

Each of these methods may also be accessed via the URL facade:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\URL;

echo URL::current();

URLs For Named Routes

The route helper may be used to generate URLs to named routes. Named routes allow you to generate URLs without being coupled to the actual URL defined on the route. Therefore, if the route's URL changes, no changes need to be made to your route function calls. For example, imagine your application contains a route defined like the following:

Route::get('/post/{post}', function () {
    //
})->name('post.show');

To generate a URL to this route, you may use the route helper like so:

echo route('post.show', ['post' => 1]);

// http://example.com/post/1

You will often be generating URLs using the primary key of Eloquent models. For this reason, you may pass Eloquent models as parameter values. The route helper will automatically extract the model's primary key:

echo route('post.show', ['post' => $post]);

URLs For Controller Actions

The action function generates a URL for the given controller action. You do not need to pass the full namespace of the controller. Instead, pass the controller class name relative to the App\Http\Controllers namespace:

$url = action('HomeController@index');

If the controller method accepts route parameters, you may pass them as the second argument to the function:

$url = action('UserController@profile', ['id' => 1]);

Default Values

For some applications, you may wish to specify request-wide default values for certain URL parameters. For example, imagine many of your routes define a {locale} parameter:

Route::get('/{locale}/posts', function () {
    //
})->name('post.index');

It is cumbersome to always pass the locale every time you call the route helper. So, you may use the URL::defaults method to define a default value for this parameter that will always be applied during the current request. You may wish to call this method from a route middleware so that you have access to the current request:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\URL;

class SetDefaultLocaleForUrls
{
    public function handle($request, Closure $next)
    {
        URL::defaults(['locale' => $request->user()->locale]);

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Once the default value for the locale parameter has been set, you are no longer required to pass its value when generating URLs via the route helper.