Load Service Providers & Aliases for Local/Development Environment Only in Laravel 5

In laravel, there are times when you need to install packages only for your local or development environment for debugging and testing purposes.

Even if you specify those packages in require-dev section of your composer.json file, you still need to add the service providers and aliases in the config/app.php file. Without that, it won’t work.

With Laravel 5, you can easily load service providers based on your environment. In this example, we’ll install the barryvdh/laravel-debugbar package which displays a pretty debug information during testing of your application.

1. Add the package to your composer.json file

"require-dev": {
    "fzaninotto/faker": "~1.4",
    "mockery/mockery": "0.9.*",
    "phpunit/phpunit": "~4.0",
    "phpspec/phpspec": "~2.1",
    "barryvdh/laravel-debugbar": "^2.0"
}

Save the file, and do a composer update.

composer update

2. Create a new ServiceProvider called LocalServiceProvider

// file: app/Providers/LocalServiceProvider.php
<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;

class LocalServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{

    protected $providers = [
        'Barryvdh\Debugbar\ServiceProvider'
    ];
    protected $aliases = [
        'Debugbar' => 'Barryvdh\Debugbar\Facade'
    ];
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot()
    {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Register any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function register()
    {
        //register the service providers for local environment
        if ($this->app->isLocal() && !empty($this->providers)) {
            foreach ($this->providers as $provider) {
                $this->app->register($provider);
            }
            //register the alias
            if (!empty($this->aliases)) {
                foreach ($this->aliases as $alias => $facade) {
                    $this->app->alias($alias, $facade);
                }
            }
        }

    }
}

3. Add the new ServiceProvider to the config/app.php service provider list

/*
 * Application Service Providers...
 */
App\Providers\AppServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\EventServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\RouteServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\LocalServiceProvider::class,

To ensure laravel detects the correct environment, you have to make sure you are specifying the correct environment in your .env file.

APP_ENV=local

Now whenever you have packages you want to use only in your local environment, you can append their service providers to the $providers array and their aliases to the $aliases array. This way, they don’t get loaded unnecessarily in your production environment.