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Laravel Support

A collection of small, dependency-light helpers for things almost every Laravel project ends up writing by hand: string/array/date/number formatting, casting request-style input, safe redirects, money and enum utilities, building Eloquent eager-load constraints, generating migrations at runtime, and hydrating plain PHP objects from arrays (including nested objects, Carbon dates, Collections and enums).

Everything is a plain static call — no service container bindings, no facades to fake in tests, no configuration to publish. This package only adds what Laravel doesn't already give you: nothing here duplicates a native Str, Arr, Number, or Eloquent method — where one already exists, use it directly instead.

Table of contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• How this package is organized
• Helpers
  • StringHelper
  • ArrayHelper
  • ObjectHelper
  • DateHelper
  • NumberHelper
  • MoneyHelper
  • ValueHelper
  • ValidationHelper
  • HtmlHelper
  • FileHelper
  • UrlHelper
  • EnumHelper
  • CollectionHelper
  • EloquentHelper
  • SchemaHelper
  • SqlHelper
  • LaravelHelper
  • CacheHelper
  • LabelHelper
  • SseHelper
• Object hydration
• Model traits (HasSlug, HasMetadata)
• InteractsWithEnum
• Makeable objects (IsMakeable, Component)
• Runtime migration generation
• Optional dependencies
• Testing & code quality
• Security
• License

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• illuminate/support 9.x through 12.x (works with Laravel 9 through 12)

Installation

The service provider (CaueSantos\Support\ServiceProvider) is auto-discovered by Laravel — there is nothing to register or publish.

How this package is organized

Every class named XyzHelper lives under CaueSantos\Support\Helpers and exposes only public static methods — use the class and call it, nothing to instantiate:

A handful of classes live directly under CaueSantos\Support because they aren't stateless utility helpers — traits meant to be used on your own classes, small value objects, or tools with their own constructor/state (object hydration, migration generation). Those are documented in their own sections below.

StringHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\StringHelper — string generation and formatting that Laravel's own Str class doesn't cover.

Need to replace only the first occurrence of a substring, or slugify a string for a URL? Use Laravel's own Str::replaceFirst() / Str::slug() directly — this package used to wrap both, but they're already exactly what you need with no difference in behavior.

ArrayHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\ArrayHelper — recursive array transforms, plucking, key renaming, and tree building.

isListOfArrays() looks similar to Laravel's native Arr::isList() but checks something different: Arr::isList() only cares whether the keys are sequential, while isListOfArrays() additionally requires at least one element to itself be an array.

modifyRecursive(), mapRecursive(), buildPathArrays() and pluckGrouped() cover tree/menu-shaped data — see their docblocks in src/Helpers/ArrayHelper.php for the exact shape each one expects and returns (buildPathArrays() in particular returns one flattened list of every leaf's path segments, not one path-array per leaf — check its docblock before relying on the shape).

ObjectHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\ObjectHelper — deep array ⇄ stdClass conversion via a JSON round-trip.

DateHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\DateHelper — date validation/formatting and minute-to-hour formatting.

isValidDate() isn't the same as Carbon's own Carbon::hasFormat(): hasFormat() only checks that a string matches a format's shape — it actually returns true for Carbon::hasFormat('2024-02-30', 'Y-m-d'), an impossible date. isValidDate() round-trips the value back through the same format and rejects it if it doesn't match exactly, so it correctly returns false there.

For "now, in a given timezone", just use Laravel's own now('UTC') — no helper needed.

NumberHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\NumberHelper — byte formatting, memory usage, lightweight id generation, and clamping.

Laravel's own Number::fileSize() (Illuminate\Support\Number) looks similar but always pads to the given precision (Number::fileSize(1536, precision: 2) -> "1.50 KB"), where formatBytes() trims trailing zeros ("1.5 KB"). Pick whichever output style you want — they're genuinely different, not interchangeable.

MoneyHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\MoneyHelper — rounding-safe, cents-based money conversion and arithmetic. For currency formatting (symbols, locales), use Laravel's own Number::currency() instead — this class only covers what that doesn't: safe integer arithmetic.

ValueHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\ValueHelper — emptiness checks and instance-of checks that read better than nested ternaries.

ValidationHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\ValidationHelper — the one thing Laravel doesn't already give you a one-liner for: namespacing attributes for "each row of this array" validation rules.

To build a ValidationException from a plain attribute => message(s) array, just call Laravel's own \Illuminate\Validation\ValidationException::withMessages($errors) directly — it already accepts exactly that shape, no wrapper needed.

HtmlHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\HtmlHelper — small HTML-generation utilities.

FileHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\FileHelper — temp files, zip/unzip, CSV generation, MIME labels.

UrlHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\UrlHelper — external-vs-internal URL detection and open-redirect protection. Laravel doesn't ship anything for this out of the box.

EnumHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\EnumHelper — utilities for any PHP 8.1+ enum (backed or pure).

See also InteractsWithEnum to add these as methods directly on the enum itself.

CollectionHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\CollectionHelper — building nested Laravel Collections that support both array and object-style access.

EloquentHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\EloquentHelper — relation-loaded checks, model mapping, and closures for Eloquent's constrained eager loading.

SchemaHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\SchemaHelper — schema introspection, DDL helpers and SQL fragment building.

dropColumnIfExists() is portable across every driver Laravel supports (MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server). The foreign-key methods are portable on Laravel 11+ (via Schema::getForeignKeys()), with a MySQL/MariaDB-only fallback on older versions — note that SQLite's foreign keys have no constraint name at all, so they can be detected but not dropped there. canBeHistorical() stays MariaDB-only: system versioning has no equivalent in MySQL, Postgres or SQL Server.

SqlHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\SqlHelper — parsing and analyzing raw SQL strings. Requires greenlion/php-sql-parser (see Optional dependencies).

LaravelHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\LaravelHelper — small, one-off framework integrations that don't warrant their own class.

CacheHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\CacheHelper — a cache-stampede-safe remember(). Requires a cache store that supports atomic locks (redis, memcached, database, dynamodb, or the array store).

Looking for a "serve stale data while refreshing in the background" strategy instead of blocking? That's Laravel's own Cache::flexible() — a different trade-off, not a replacement for this.

LabelHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\LabelHelper — tiny display-label formatting.

SseHelper

CaueSantos\Support\Helpers\SseHelper — a minimal Server-Sent Events response helper.

Object hydration

Two traits and one static class work together to fill a plain PHP object's typed properties from an array — casting scalars to their declared type, parsing dates into Carbon, resolving enums, building nested Collections, and recursively hydrating nested typed objects.

• IsHydratable — use this on any class to get ::hydrate($data) (new instance), ::hydrateNoConstructor($data) (skips your __construct(), useful when it has required arguments), and ->hydrateCurrent($data) (hydrate an already-built instance in place). Accepts an array, an ArrayAccess implementation, or a stdClass (e.g. straight from json_decode()).
• AutoJsonSerializable — adds jsonSerialize(): array, reflecting over every non-static public/protected/private property (recursing into nested objects, unwrapping enum values). To have json_encode($person) call it automatically, also implements \JsonSerializable on the class; otherwise call $person->jsonSerialize() directly. Override serializeWith() to merge in computed keys that aren't backed by a real property.
• ClassHydrator — the static engine both traits delegate to.
  • ClassHydrator::hydrate($existingInstance, $data) — hydrate an object you didn't build through IsHydratable.
  • ClassHydrator::hydrateMany(Person::class, $rows) — hydrate a list of arrays into a Collection of Person instances in one call.
  • ClassHydrator::dehydrate($person) — the reverse of hydration: a plain array back out of a hydrated object (enums unwrapped to their value, dates formatted as ISO-8601 strings, nested objects/Collections recursed into), without going through a JSON round-trip like AutoJsonSerializable does.
• ClassPropertyHelper — the lower-level type-coercion primitives (toBoolean(), toInteger(), convertValue(), ...) ClassHydrator is built on. Most consumers won't need to call it directly.

Model traits (HasSlug, HasMetadata)

HasSlug auto-generates a slug column from another attribute when a model is created, appending -2, -3, etc. if it would otherwise collide:

HasMetadata gives a model a flexible, dot-notation-aware key-value store backed by a single JSON column (default: meta — cast it to array):

InteractsWithEnum

use on a backed or pure enum to add a default label() derived from the case name, plus options()/values()/names() static passthroughs to EnumHelper. Override label() on the enum itself for custom per-case labels.

Makeable objects (IsMakeable, Component)

IsMakeable is a one-method trait: use it on any class to get a ::make(...$arguments) static constructor that just forwards to new static(...$arguments) — handy for a fluent, static-friendly construction style.

Component is a tiny, ready-made value object built on IsMakeable for describing a named UI component with its data — e.g. handing a Blade/Inertia component name and props around as a single value:

Runtime migration generation

RuntimeMigration builds a real Laravel migration file (not a migration run in-process) from a Blueprint closure, so you can generate migrations programmatically — e.g. from a schema-builder UI, an artisan command, or a code generator.

If the target directory doesn't exist, or the file can't be written, create()/update() throw CaueSantos\Support\Exceptions\MigrationGenerationException.

Two smaller pieces support this:

• Stub — a minimal {{ placeholder }} template renderer used to fill in the bundled stubs/migration.create.stub and stubs/migration.update.stub templates. Stub::create($path, ['table' => 'posts'])->render().
• HistoricalDataMigration — wraps MariaDB's system-versioning (ADD SYSTEM VERSIONING) DDL so an "update" migration generated by RuntimeMigration can safely alter a historical/versioned table. MariaDB only.

Optional dependencies

Two methods need a package this library doesn't force on every consumer — both are declared under Composer's suggest, not require, so install them only if you actually call the method that needs them:

Testing & code quality

All three run in CI on every push and pull request, across a PHP 8.2–8.4 matrix (see .github/workflows/).

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email instead of using the issue tracker.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.