Laravel 7 Api incomplete?

Question

I started with Laravel 7 a few weeks ago. It happened to me multiple times that after reading about a topic on the Laravel website, I wanted to check the details of a function, for example:

Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route::group()

So I went to the Laravel API, and could find the Route facade, but not the group function.

What am I doing wrong? Where do you check for example the exact signature of a function?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The method group in Route::group() is inherited from another class, RegistrarGroup.

See the docblock method in the source file, vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Support/Facades/Route.php:

@method static \Illuminate\Routing\Router|\Illuminate\Routing\RouteRegistrar group(\Closure|string|array $attributes, \Closure|string $routes)

so, this is what you look for in the API documentation:

https://laravel.com/api/7.x/Illuminate/Contracts/Routing/Registrar.html#method_group

Answer 2

That is because a Facade, by definition, is only an 'interface' to the methods exponed by another object, so you will not find the actual methods available by visiting the facade code.

Usually you can find the actual class that a facade resolves to (when not mocked) by checking the docblock in the source code and navigate to that class.

A very useful tool to overcome this problem and provide autocompletion (and inspection) for facades on your IDE is the package https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper