Dynamic paths for laravel 5

While building multi-tenancy packages for Laravel 5 I had to find out how to make the paths and namespaces dynamic.

This would involve:

views; adding a template directory dynamically that is available in the root namespace
lang; adding a language directory dynamically that is available in the root namespace
routes; adding a routes file dynamically
config; merging additional configuration files from a dynamic location
vendor; allowing custom vendors and packages to be available from a dynamic location

Solution

views

Using a service provider you can use the following in your boot() method for views to be available in the root namespace (view('your-view') instead of view('package::your-view')):

$this->app['view']->addLocation('/your/new/location');

lang

Using a service provider you can use the following in your boot() method where $path is the new path for your root namespace translations:

$app->bindShared('translation.loader', function($app) use ($path)
{
      return new \Illuminate\Translation\FileLoader($app['files'], $path);
});
$app->bindShared('translator', function($app)
{
      $translator = new \Illuminate\Translation\Translator($app['translation.loader'], $app['config']['app.locale']);
      $translator->setFallback($app['config']['app.fallback_locale']);
      return $translator;
});

routes

Routes is by far the easiest. Simply include them using a require_once or by using the Laravel method: \File::requireOnce().

config

I used a directory that would allow a tenant to overrule core configs. Please advice there are no security nor sanity checks here so access should be limited.

Using a service provider you can use the following in your boot() method

 foreach (\File::allFiles('/path/to/configs') as $path) {
       $key = \File::name($path);
       $app['config']->set($key, array_merge(require $path, $app['config']->get($key, [])));
 }

This will merge existing configurations by overruling their values with the provided config files.

vendor

Really interesting is the possibility to use dynamically loaded classes. In order to do this you will need to use the ClassLoader addDirectories() method in your service provider

\Illuminate\Support\ClassLoader::addDirectories(['/path/to/vendors']);

additional considerations

The above code can be implemented using service providers. In order for a server provider to work you must add them to the config/app.php file under the providers array. Not doing so will not enable any of the code in the service provider.