A Beginner's Guide to Resource Routes in Laravel

Hi, If you are a Laravel learner then you may have used routes in laravel rather than creating them one by one for each crud operation we can do this by a single line of code.

See the code snippet below.

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Why Resource Routes

When building a web application in Laravel, you need to define routes that map to the various actions that your application can perform. For simple applications, you might be able to get away with defining individual routes for each action. However, for more complex applications, this can quickly become unwieldy.

That's where resource routes come in. Resource routes are a way of defining a set of routes that map to the various CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations for a resourceful controller. By using resource routes, you can quickly define all of the necessary routes for your application in a single line of code.

Defining Resource Routes

Resource routes in Laravel are defined using the Route::resource method. Here's an example:

Route::resource('posts', PostController::class);
                
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In this example, we define a set of resource routes for the PostController. Laravel will automatically generate routes for each of the CRUD operations, as well as a few additional routes:

Method	URI	Action	Route Name
GET	/posts	index	posts.index
GET	/posts/create	create	posts.create
POST	/posts	store	posts.store
GET	/posts/{post}	show	posts.show
GET	/posts/{post}/edit	edit	posts.edit
PUT/PATCH	/posts/{post}	update	posts.update
DELETE	/posts/{post}	destroy	posts.destroy

The Route::resource the method generates these routes based on RESTful conventions. Here's what each route does:

• GET /posts (posts.index): Lists all posts
• GET /posts/create (posts.create): Displays a form for creating a new post
• POST /posts (posts.store): Creates a new post
• GET /posts/{post} (posts.show): Displays a specific post
• GET /posts/{post}/edit (posts.edit): Displays a form for editing a post
• PUT/PATCH /posts/{post} (posts.update): Updates a specific post
• DELETE /posts/{post} (posts.destroy): Deletes a specific post

Customizing Resource Routes

While the default resource routes are convenient, you may want to customize them to better fit your application's needs. Laravel provides several options for customizing resource routes:

Specifying Which Routes to Generate

By default, Route::resource generates all of the resource routes. However, you can use the only and except options to specify which routes to generate. For example, if you only want to generate the index, show, and destroy routes, you can do this:

Route::resource('posts', PostController::class)->only();
                
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Similarly, if you want to generate all of the routes except for the create and edit routes, you can do this:

Route::resource('posts', PostController::class)->except();
                
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Naming Resource Routes

The next thing we need to discuss regarding resource routes is naming them. By default, Laravel generates resource routes with names based on the resource name and HTTP verb. For example, a GET request to /posts generates a route named posts.index, while a POST request to /posts generates a route named posts.store.

However, you may want to customize these names to fit your application's naming conventions. To do so, you can pass a second argument to the Route::resource method with an array of options. One of these options is, names which allows you to customize the names of the generated routes.

Here's an example of how to customize the names of a resource:

Route::resource('posts', 'PostsController', [
    'names' => [
        'index' => 'posts.list',
        'show' => 'posts.view',
        'create' => 'posts.add',
        'edit' => 'posts.edit',
        'update' => 'posts.update',
        'store' => 'posts.save',
        'destroy' => 'posts.delete',
    ]
]);

                
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In this example, we've customized the names of all the resource routes for the posts resource. For example, the posts.index route is now named posts.list, and the posts.show route is named posts.view. You can customize the names of as many or as few routes as you like.

Customizing the names of your resource routes can make your code more readable and easier to understand, especially if you have a lot of routes in your application. It also makes it easier to generate URLs for your resource routes using the route helper function.

In conclusion, resource routes in Laravel are a powerful and convenient way to define all the CRUD routes for a given resource in a single line of code. They provide a standardized way of naming and organizing your routes, making it easier to maintain and understand your application's codebase. By default, resource routes use a set of conventions for naming and generating routes, but you can customize these names to fit your application's needs using the names option.

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Conclusion

In this post, we've covered the basics of using resource routes in Laravel to define CRUD routes for your application's resources in a single line of code. We've discussed how resource routes follow a standardized naming convention, making it easy to organize and maintain your application's routes. I hope this will help.