Test your Laravel package📦 locally in your Laravel project

Recently, while we were developing a new Laravel package, we wanted to check and ensure that everything works as expected in an “actual” Laravel project.

While developing the package, we need a quick way to check functionality.

To do so, follow below steps:
1) Add your package in Laravel project: Let’s name it “mypackage”, add it to root directory of your project.

2) Add package “repositories” block in your composer.json. For general information on how to declare repositories, please refer to the composer documentation.

composer.json

{
....
"repositories": {
     "dev-package": {
       "type": "path",
       "url": "mypackage", // Path to your package folder
       "options": {
        "symlink": true
       }
     }
 }
....
}

By setting the "type": "path" composer knows that you would like to reference a local repository and the url defines the package location.

symlink option and composer will create a symlink to the package folder in vendor directory.

3) The last step is to issue a composer require command to include the package in your Laravel project.

composer require radicalloop/mypackage @dev

After executing this command the package folder is symlinked into the application’s vendor folder and every change to your package will be immediately available in your application.

That’s it! Now you should be able to use/test your package in your Laravel project. Big thanks to composer. 😄

Any questions or suggestions? please comment!

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