Organize your Laravel routes for better and maintainable code

Out of the box Laravel 5.5 provides 4 routes files api.php, channels.php, console.php and web.php.

The web.php route file is for our web interface, api.php is for APIs, console.php is for artisan command registration and channels.php is for broadcasting purpose.

We all know these things, so far nothing new in that right!

💡 What is the point of this post all about actually:

If you are working on a small application and you don’t have too many routes defined for your app then web.php is enough for you, but what if you have hundreds or more routes defined, for example routes for Admin level, for customers, for some other type of users (related to auth) and the common unprotected routes which are available for all type of visitors.

⚠️ Then keeping all the routes together to just a single route file will easily make your routes unmanageable.

✅ Here is a really nice & clean solution to this problem which I found recently & wanted to share with you all

Assume we have three types of routes –

1. For admin level
2. For user level [can signup, login, manage profile etc.]
3. Public routes [home, blog, contact page etc.]

Now we create two directories inside routes —

modified routes directory in laravel 5.5

☝ ️ routes/web_ — _here goes all our web interface related routes

✌ ️ routes/api— here all API related routes

routes files moved

Now we put the default api.php inside api 📁 and the web.php to the web 📁 and let’s leave the other two i.e. console.php & channels.php to their default place i.e. the routes 📁.

✔️Create a new file as admin.php inside web 📁 this file will contain all our admin related web routes then

✔️create user.php too in there which will represent all the routes related to user level

🎯 Here is the tricky part:

open Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php _ _ — this file is responsible for bootstrapping all routes of our application. Check the map() method to understand how it recognizes different routes files

the map() method inside Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php

check the mapApiRoutes() & mapWebRoutes() methods, they are just targeting the web.php and api.php which we’ve already moved, so let’s change the same in there

change the base_path() of two methods accordingly

Now create new methods for both admin.php & user.php inside RouteServiceProvider.php

create new methods for both type of routes

see how we were able to set the prefix , controller namespace & middleware! you can customize them as per your app

now simply call them from the map() method of RouteServiceProvider

update the map() method accordingly

⛳️ The final step:

now open routes/web/user.php and add some test route

navigate to your-laravel.app/user/test and its done 😱

you have successfully been able to separate different routes for your app, it looks so much clean and easy to maintain too isn’t?

_Thanks for reading! Have Fun, Happy Coding !!