Self Healing URLs

Self Healing URLs is a simple Laravel package inspired by this video from Aaron Francis.

It allows you to mark Eloquent models as self-healing so that the URLs generated for said models can include an SEO friendly slug whilst not breaking should the slug alter in any way.

Installation

The package can be installed via Composer:

composer require lukeraymonddowning/self-healing-urls

Once installed, add the HasSelfHealingUrls trait to any Eloquent model:

use Lukeraymonddowning\SelfHealingUrls\Concerns\HasSelfHealingUrls;

class Post extends Model
{
    use HasSelfHealingUrls;
}

If your model has a column named slug, you're all set. Otherwise, define a $slug property on your model to inform the package which column to use instead:

use Lukeraymonddowning\SelfHealingUrls\Concerns\HasSelfHealingUrls;

class Post extends Model
{
    use HasSelfHealingUrls;
    
    protected $slug = 'title';
}

Don't worry if your "slug" isn't URL friendly; the package will take care of formatting it for you. In fact, it doesn't even have to be unique because the defined unique identifier for your model will also be included at the end.

Limitations

By default, the package requires that your unique identifier (such as the id or uuid column) not have any - characters. You can implement your own IdentifierHandler as detailed in the next section.

Unless you implement a custom Rerouter, the package requires that you have defined names to the routes you want to use with self healing URLs.

Using a custom IdentifierHandler

If you need to customize how a slug is joined to a model identifier (which by default is just a hyphen), you can create your own class implementing IdentifierHandler and register it in the register method of your AppServiceProvider.

Here is an example using an _ instead of a hyphen:

class UnderscoreIdentifierHandler implements IdentifierHandler
{
    public function joinToSlug(string $slug, string|int $identifier): string
    {
        return "{$slug}_{$identifier}";
    }

    public function separateFromSlug(string $value): string
    {
        return Str::afterLast($value, '_');
    }
}

Register the custom handler in your AppServiceProvider like so:

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function register(): void
    {
        $this->app->singleton(IdentifierHandler::class, UnderscoreIdentifierHandler::class);
    }
}

Attributions

Without Aaron's video, I wouldn't have even thought about this, so props to him. Go watch the video.