Eloquent-Sluggable

Easy creation of slugs for your Eloquent models in Laravel 5.

• Background: What is a slug
• Installation
• Updating your Eloquent Models
• Usage
• The SlugService Class
• Events
• Configuration
  • includeTrashed
  • maxLength
  • method
  • onUpdate
  • reserved
  • separator
  • source
  • unique
  • uniqueSuffix
• Extending Sluggable
  • customizeSlugEngine
  • scopeWithUniqueSlugConstraints
  • scopeFindSimilarSlugs
• SluggableScopeHelpers Trait
• Route Model Binding
• Bugs, Suggestions and Contributions
• Copyright and License

Background: What is a slug?

A slug is a simplified version of a string, typically URL-friendly. The act of "slugging" a string usually involves converting it to one case, and removing any non-URL-friendly characters (spaces, accented letters, ampersands, etc.). The resulting string can then be used as an identifier for a particular resource.

For example, I have a blog with posts. I could refer to each post via the ID:

http://example.com/post/1
http://example.com/post/2

... but that's not particularly friendly (especially for SEO). You probably would prefer to use the post's title in the URL, but that becomes a problem if your post is titled "My Dinner With André & François", because this is pretty ugly too:

http://example.com/post/My+Dinner+With+Andr%C3%A9+%26+Fran%C3%A7ois

The solution is to create a slug for the title and use that instead. You might want to use Laravel's built-in Str::slug() method to convert that title into something friendlier:

http://example.com/post/my-dinner-with-andre-francois

A URL like that will make users happier (it's readable, easier to type, etc.).

For more information, you might want to read this description on Wikipedia.

Slugs tend to be unique as well. So if I wrote another post with the same title, I'd want to distinguish between them somehow, typically with an incremental counter added to the end of the slug:

http://example.com/post/my-dinner-with-andre-francois
http://example.com/post/my-dinner-with-andre-francois-1
http://example.com/post/my-dinner-with-andre-francois-2

This keeps URLs unique.

The Eloquent-Sluggable package for Laravel 5 aims to handle all of this for you automatically, with minimal configuration.

Installation

NOTE: Depending on your version of Laravel, you should install a different version of the package:

Laravel Version	Sluggable Version
4.x	2.x
5.1, 5.2	4.0
5.1, 5.2, 5.3	4.1

* The 4.1 version should work with Laravel 5.1 and 5.2, but might not in the future.

Also note that different versions of the package have different configuration settings. See UPGRADING.md for details.

Finally, the latest version of the package uses traits and few other "new" PHP features, so you should be running PHP 5.6 or higher. HHVM is not supported.

First, you'll need to install the package via Composer:

$ composer require cviebrock/eloquent-sluggable:^4.1

Then, update config/app.php by adding an entry for the service provider.

'providers' => [
    // ...
    Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\ServiceProvider::class,
];

Finally, from the command line again, publish the default configuration file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\ServiceProvider"

Updating your Eloquent Models

Your models should use the Sluggable trait, which has an abstract method sluggable() that you need to define. This is where any model-specific configuration is set (see Configuration below for details):

use Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\Sluggable;

class Post extends Model
{
    use Sluggable;

    /**
     * Return the sluggable configuration array for this model.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function sluggable()
    {
        return [
            'slug' => [
                'source' => 'title'
            ]
        ];
    }

}

Of course, your model and database will need a column in which to store the slug. You will need to add this manually via a migration.

(Previous versions of the package included an artisan sluggable:table command to assist you. This has been deprecated because it's easy enough to generate your own migrations with artisan make:migration).

That's it ... your model is now "sluggable"!

Usage

Saving a model is easy:

$post = new Post([
    'title' => 'My Awesome Blog Post',
]);

$post->save();

And so is retrieving the slug:

echo $post->slug;

Also note that if you are replicating your models using Eloquent's replicate() method, the package will automatically re-slug the model afterwards to ensure uniqueness (in previous versions of the package, you needed to do this manually).

$post = new Post([
    'title' => 'My Awesome Blog Post',
]);

$post->save();
// $post->slug is "my-awesome-blog-post"

$newPost = $post->replicate();
// $newPost->slug is "my-awesome-blog-post-1"

The SlugService Class

Unlike previous versions of the package, all the logic to generate slugs is handled by the \Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\Services\SlugService class.

Generally, you won't need to access this class directly, although there is one static method that can be used to generate a slug for a given string without actually creating or saving an associated model.

use \Cviebrock\EloquentSluggable\Services\SlugService;

$slug = SlugService::createSlug(Post::class, 'slug', 'My First Post');

This would be useful for Ajax-y controllers or the like, where you want to show a user what the unique slug would be for a given test input, before actually creating a model. The first two arguments to the method are the model and slug field being tested, and the third argument is the source string to use for testing the slug.

You can also pass an optional array of configuration values as the fourth argument. These will take precedence over the normal configuration values for the slug field being tested. For example, if your model is configured to use unique slugs, but you want to generate the "base" version of a slug for some reason, you could do:

$slug = SlugService::createSlug(Post::class, 'slug', 'My First Post', ['unique' => false]);

Events

NOTE: Events should be working but are not fully tested yet. Please help me out!

Sluggable models will fire two Eloquent model events: "slugging" and "slugged".

The "slugging" event is fired just before the slug is generated. If the callback from this event returns false, then the slugging is not performed.

The "slugged" event is fired just after a slug is generated. It won't be called in the case where the model doesn't need slugging (as determined by the needsSlugging() method).

You can hook into either of these events just like any other Eloquent model event:

Post::registerModelEvent('slugging', function($post) {
    if ($post->someCondition()) {
        // the model won't be slugged
        return false;
    }
});

Post::registerModelEvent('slugged', function($post) {
    Log::info('Post slugged: ' . $post->getSlug());
});

Configuration

Configuration was designed to be as flexible as possible. You can set up defaults for all of your Eloquent models, and then override those settings for individual models.

By default, global configuration can be set in the app/config/sluggable.php file. If a configuration isn't set, then the package defaults from vendor/cviebrock/eloquent-sluggable/resources/config/sluggable.php are used. Here is an example configuration, with all the default settings shown:

return [
    'source'          => null,
    'maxLength'       => null,
    'method'          => null,
    'separator'       => '-',
    'unique'          => true,
    'uniqueSuffix'    => null,
    'includeTrashed'  => false,
    'reserved'        => null,
];

For individual models, configuration is handled in the sluggable() method that you need to implement. That method should return an indexed array where the keys represent the fields where the slug value is stored and the values are the configuration for that field.

public function sluggable()
{
    return [
        'title-slug' => [
            'source' => 'title'
        ],
        'author-slug' => [
            'source' => ['author.firstname', 'author.lastname']
        ],
    ];
}

Unlike previous versions of the package, this now means you can now create multiple slugs for the same model, based on different source strings and with different configuration options. For example:

public function sluggable()
{
    return [
        'title-slug' => [
            'source' => 'title'
        ],
        'author-slug' => [
            'source' => ['author.firstname', 'author.lastname'],
            'separator' => '_'
        ],
    ];
}

source

This is the field or array of fields from which to build the slug. Each $model->field is concatenated (with space separation) to build the sluggable string. This can be model attributes (i.e. fields in the database), relationship attributes, or custom getters.

To reference fields from related models, use dot-notation. For example, the slug for the following book will be generated from its author's name and the book's title:

class Book extends Eloquent
{
    use Sluggable;

    protected $fillable = ['title'];

    public function sluggable() {
        return [
            'slug' => [
                'source' => ['author.name', 'title']
            ]
        ];
    }

    public function author() {
        return $this->belongsTo(Author::class);
    }
}
...
class Author extends Eloquent
{
    protected $fillable = ['name'];
}

An example using a custom getter:

class Person extends Eloquent
{
    use Sluggable;

    public function sluggable()
    {
        return [
            'slug' => [
                'source' => 'fullname'
            ]
        ];
    }

    public function getFullnameAttribute() {
        return $this->firstname . ' ' . $this->lastname;
    }
}

If source is empty, false or null, then the value of $model->__toString() is used as the source for slug generation.

maxLength

Setting this to a positive integer will ensure that your generated slugs are restricted to a maximum length (e.g. to ensure that they fit within your database fields). By default, this value is null and no limit is enforced.

Note: If unique is enabled (which it is by default), and you anticipate having several models with the same slug, then you should set this value to a few characters less than the length of your database field. The reason why is that the class will append "-1", "-2", "-3", etc., to subsequent models in order to maintain uniqueness. These incremental extensions aren't included in part of the maxLength calculation.

method

Defines the method used to turn the sluggable string into a slug. There are three possible options for this configuration:

1. When method is null (the default setting), the package uses Cocur/Slugify to create the slug.

2. When method is a callable, then that function or class method is used. The function/method should expect two parameters: the string to process, and a separator string. For example, to duplicate the default behaviour, you could do:

'method' => ['Illuminate\\Support\\Str', 'slug'],

1. You can also define method as a closure (again, expecting two parameters):

'method' => function ($string, $separator) {
    return strtolower(preg_replace('/[^a-z]+/i', $separator, $string));
},

Any other values for method will throw an exception.

For more complex slugging requirements, see Extending Sluggable below.

onUpdate

By default, updating a model will not try and generate a new slug value. It is assumed that once your slug is generated, you won't want it to change (this may be especially true if you are using slugs for URLs and don't want to mess up your SEO mojo).

If you want to regenerate one or more of your model's slug fields, you can set those fields to null or an empty string before the update:

$post->slug = null;
$post->update(['title' => 'My New Title']);

If this is the behaviour you want every time you update a model, then set the onUpdate option to true.

separator

This defines the separator used when building a slug, and is passed to the method defined above. The default value is a hyphen.

unique

This is a boolean defining whether slugs should be unique among all models of the given type. For example, if you have two blog posts and both are called "My Blog Post", then they will both sluggify to "my-blog-post" if unique is false. This could be a problem, e.g. if you use the slug in URLs.

By setting unique to true, then the second Post model will sluggify to "my-blog-post-1". If there is a third post with the same title, it will sluggify to "my-blog-post-2" and so on. Each subsequent model will get an incremental value appended to the end of the slug, ensuring uniqueness.

uniqueSuffix

If you want to use a different way of identifying uniqueness (other than auto-incrementing integers), you can set the uniqueSuffix configuration to a function or callable that generates the "unique" values for you.

The function should take three parameters: the base slug (i.e. the non-unique slug), the separator string, and an \Illuminate\Support\Collection of all the other slug strings that start with the same slug. You can then do whatever you want to create a new suffix that hasn't been used by any of the slugs in the collection. For example, if you wanted to use letters instead of numbers as a suffix, this is one way to achieve that:

'uniqueSuffix' => function ($slug, $separator, Collection $list) {
    $size = count($list);

    return chr($size + 96);
}

includeTrashed

Setting this to true will also check deleted models when trying to enforce uniqueness. This only affects Eloquent models that are using the softDelete feature. Default is false, so soft-deleted models don't count when checking for uniqueness.

reserved

An array of values that will never be allowed as slugs, e.g. to prevent collisions with existing routes or controller methods, etc.. This can be an array, or a closure that returns an array. Defaults to null: no reserved slug names.

Short Configuration

The package supports a really short configuration syntax, if you are truly lazy:

public function sluggable() {
    return [
        'slug'
    ];
}

This will use all the default options from app/config/sluggable.php, use the model's __toString() method as the source, and store the slug in the slug field.

Extending Sluggable

Sometimes the configuration options aren't sufficient for complex needs (e.g. maybe the uniqueness test needs to take other attributes into account, or maybe you need to make two slugs for the same model).

In instances like these, we try to offer hooks into the slugging workflow where you can use your own functions, either on a per-model basis, or in your own trait that extends the package's trait.

NOTE: Previously, these hooks were usually accessed by overloading methods on your model. However, because the package now uses the SlugService class to do the heavy-lifting, you need to either use entry points we've already provided, or extend SlugService class directly.

customizeSlugEngine

/**
 * @param \Cocur\Slugify\Slugify $engine
 * @param string $attribute
 * @return \Cocur\Slugify\Slugify
 */
public function customizeSlugEngine(Slugify $engine, $attribute)
{
    ...
}

If this method exists on your model, the Slugify engine can be customized before slugging occurs. This might be where you change the character mappings that are used, or alter language files, etc..

You can customize the engine on a per-model and per-attribute basis (maybe your model has two slug fields, and one of them needs customization).

Take a look at tests/Models/PostWithCustomEngine.php for an example.

scopeWithUniqueSlugConstraints

/**
 * @param \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder $query
 * @param \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model $model
 * @param string $attribute
 * @param array $config
 * @param string $slug
 * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder
 */
public function scopeWithUniqueSlugConstraints(Builder $query, Model $model, $attribute, $config, $slug)
{
    ...
}

If this scope exists on your model, then it will also be applied to the query used to determine if a given slug is unique. The arguments passed to the scope are:

• $model -- the object being slugged
• $attribute -- the slug field being generated,
• $config -- the configuration array for the given model and attribute
• $slug -- the "base" slug (before any unique suffixes are applied)

Feel free to use these values anyway you like in your query scope. As an example, look at tests/Models/PostWithUniqueSlugConstraints.php where we generate a slug for a post from it's title, but the slug is scoped to the author. So Bob can have a post with the same title as Pam's post, but both will have the same slug.

scopeFindSimilarSlugs

/**
 * Query scope for finding "similar" slugs, used to determine uniqueness.
 *
 * @param \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder $query
 * @param \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model $model
 * @param string $attribute
 * @param array $config
 * @param string $slug
 * @return \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder
 */
public function scopeFindSimilarSlugs(Builder $query, Model $model, $attribute, $config, $slug)
{
    ...
}

This is the default scope for finding "similar" slugs for a model. Basically, we look for existing slugs that are the same as the $slug argument, or that start with $slug plus the separator string. The resulting collection is what is passed to the uniqueSuffix handler.

Generally, this query scope (which is defined in the Sluggable trait) should be left alone. However, you are free to overload it in your models.

SluggableScopeHelpers Trait

Earlier versions of the package included some helper functions for working with models and their slugs. Because you can now have more than one slug per model, this functionality has been refactored into a separate trait you can use in your application.

By adding the SluggableScopeHelpers trait to your model, you can then do things such as:

$post = Post::whereSlug($slugString)->get();

$post = Post::findBySlug($slugString);

$post = Post::findBySlugOrFail($slugString);

See SCOPE-HELPERS.md for all the details.

Route Model Binding

See ROUTE-MODEL-BINDING.md for details.

Bugs, Suggestions and Contributions

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project!

Please use Github for reporting bugs, and making comments or suggestions.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to contribute changes.

Copyright and License

eloquent-sluggable was written by Colin Viebrock and is released under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2013 Colin Viebrock