Adding shortcut in PHP Autoload causes conflict on Laravel

Question

I would like to ask you why I'm getting conflict error after added this to composer.json:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Models\\": "app/Models/",
        "Controllers\\": "app/Http/Controllers/"
    },
    ...
}

and namespace everything inside such as "app\\Models\\People\\Admin.php" be

namespace Models\People;

I have searched for this problem before with no luck, did I miss something?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You are getting this error because the autoloader is including all of the classes under App\\ first, which includes all of the classes under App\\Models and App\\Controllers too, then re-including these classes again, which causes this conflict.

To illustrate this, here is what is happening:

1. The autoloader recursively looks for all classes under the app directory.
2. It then of course finds the app/Models/People/Admin.php and include s it.
3. After it is done with autoloading all of the classes under app/ , it starts looking for class files under app/Models , finds the Admin.php class file and include s it once more.
4. The error is thrown, because for PHP you are doing something like:

class Admin {}
class Admin {}