bind vs extend in Laravel Service Container

According to Laravel’s documentation, the extend method allows the modification of resolved services.

But what is the benefit of extending a class? And what is the difference between bind and extend?

Let’s dive into that.

Binding

The bind method used to register a class into the service container.

Let’s see a real example from one of my projects:

use Google\Cloud\Translate\V2\TranslateClient;

class AppServiceProvider
{
    public function register()
    {
        $this->app->singleton(TranslateClient::class, function() {
            return new TranslateClient([
                'keyFilePath' => storage_path('security/google-vision-credentials.json'),
            ]);
        });
    }
}

The TranslateClient is ready to be injected without any additional configuration, since the config key keyFilePath was already set:

class Translate
{
    public function __construct(private TranslateClient $translateClient)
    {
    }
	
    // ...
}

That’s the power of dependency injection.

But what if I want to add a new method into the TranslateClient? Something like isTranslatable which detects whether or not the given string is translatable.

I can easily do that by extending the TranslateClient and start adding the isTranslatable method as follows:

use Google\Cloud\Translate\V2\TranslateClient;

class MyTranslateClient extends TranslateClient
{
    public function isTranslatable(string $string): bool
    {
        // ...
    }
}

$this->app->singleton(TranslateClient::class, function() {
    return new MyTranslateClient([
        'keyFilePath' => storage_path('security/google-vision-credentials.json'),
    ]);
});

That worked perfectly.

Let’s try to add isAdmin method in the Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager. This method checks the is_admin column on the users table; if it sets to 1, the user is an admin; otherwise, she’s not.

As its name implies, the AuthManager has access to all the authentication features, such as login, logout, loginUsindId, user, etc…

You can access the AuthManager in different ways:

// auth() helper
auth()->user();

// Illuminate\Support\Facades\Auth facade
// Auth::user();

// Dependency injection
public function __construct(private AuthManager $authManager)
{
    // ...
}

Ok. Let’s add the isAdmin method:

namespace App\Support;

use Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;

class MyAuthManager extends AuthManager
{
    public function __construct(private AuthManager $auth, Application $app)
    {
        parent::__construct($app);
    }

    public function isAdmin(): bool
    {
        return $this->auth->check() && $this->auth->user()->is_admin === 1;
    }
}

Let’s bind MyAuthManager into the service container:

// AppServiceProvider
use Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;

public function register()
{
    $this->app->bind(AuthManager::class, function(AuthManager $auth, Application $app) {
        return new MyAuthManager($auth, $app);
    });
}

// BadMethodCallException
// Method Illuminate\Auth\SessionGuard::isAdmin does not exist. 

Auth::isAdmin();

That didn’t work, because the bind method can’t override/modify the builtin/3rd party services.

Extending

Use the extend method whenever you want to modify a built-in/3rd party service, for example the Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager:

// AppServiceProvider
use Illuminate\Auth\AuthManager;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Application;
public function register()
{
    $this->app->extend(AuthManager::class, function(AuthManager $auth, Application $app) {
        return new MyAuthManager($auth, $app);
    });
}

It should be working now:

Auth::isAdmin();

I hope you enjoyed reading this post; keep an eye on the next upcoming ones.