Why can't Laravel find my function but the IDE can?

Question

I have a helpers.php file in the app directory of my Laravel project. In this file, I have a function that checks if an item's image is in the storage file and if it isn't it replaces it with an image not found, here is the file:

function productImage($path)
{
    return ($path != null) && file_exists('storage/' . $path) ? asset('storage/' . $path) : asset('img/error/img-not-found.jpg');
}

This is where it is called in one of my blade.php files:

@foreach($products as $product)
    <div class="product">
        <a href="{{ route('shop.show', $product->slug) }}" class="linkToInfo">
            <img src="{{ productImage($product->image) }}" alt="{{ $product->name }}" class="productImg">
            <p class="productData">{{ $product->name }}</p>
            <p class="productData">{{ $product->presentPrice() }}</p>
        </a>
    </div>
@endforeach

When I try and load this page tho, I get this error:

Answer 1

You need to either register (via alias) the class or instantiate it so that blade sees it when compiling.

Instantiate within blade :

{{ \App\Helpers::instance()->productImage($product->image) }}

Or, what I've done usually is to create an alias for your Helper class in config\app.php . This reduces a little overhead and typing as well.

Alias:

'aliases' => [
   ....
   'Helpers' => App\Helpers::class
]

Then call the alias in your blade (or whatever) file.

\Helpers::instance()->productImage($product->image);

I do a lot of static functions in the Helper class so I don't need to instantiate them. Eg \Helpers::productImage($product->image) . But the above works just as well too.

Note caps on the class:)

HTH

Answer 2

If you want to use the function "as is" (from the global namespace), you need to add the helpers.php file path to the autoload.files part of your composer.json file, like this:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
         ...
     }
     "files": [
         "app/helpers.php"
     ]
}

Then you should execute the dump-autoload command from your terminal to update the autoloader:

composer dump-autoload