LARAVEL TINKER
If you love to debug and test things in an app shell like me, then you are also a big fan of Tinker in laravel. Tinker is the shell prompt for Laravel and can be used to test and run different commands in php inside the app. You may run the following to hop into the tinker shell in a laravel environment:
php artisan tinker
Once you hop in the tinker, you can call any model or run any php command from the shell.
HOW TO RUN CONTROLLER METHOD FROM TINKER
There are times, you might feel more interest into evaluating a large controller method. To run a controller method, we first need to enter the service container of laravel. Laravel providers a helper method called ‘app()’ to enter the service container. It can then use a method called ‘call’ to access and execute a method inside a controller namespace, like the following:
app()->call('App\Http\Controllers\AdminControllers@yourmethod');
Repace your controller name and the method name after @. One thing, you need to realize is that the method ‘call’ takes the method reference, not the function itself. That means, you can not add brackets () at the end of method name while giving it in the call method.
HOW TO PASS PARAMETERS TO CONTROLLER FROM TINKER
As discussed earlier, you are passing reference only, not the function, hence you can not pass parameters like we usually do in methods/functions. We need to pass this as an argument in array.
Here is a more constructive way to do this:
# let's make an instance of controller first, can be done using make method of service container
$controller = app()->make('App\Http\Controllers\AdminControllers');
# now let's call the method, inside the container, method name is 'getNewsByCatId'
app()->call([$controller, 'getNewsByCatId']);
# pass a parameter called id = 5
app()->call([$controller, 'getNewsByCatId'], ['id' => 5]);