Route Aliases

[7snovic]

TL;DR
Be able to set some alias for a named route.

Problem & Motivation

I have a Laravel project, I had to use two Laravel packages on that project. One was implementing some authentication logic Package1 with some routes, let's say a route named package.auth. And the other package Package2 was for implementing some other logic with some UI that uses a pre-defined named routes, in this case let's say package.provider.auth.
Typically, I need to implement some routes to be able to use the second package, the problem is that, I wanted to use the routes from the Package1 into the second package, I know that some approaches may be like defining a new route like this:

Route::get('/some-new-path', 'SomeController@method`)->name('package.provider.auth')

But in my case, this will cause backward incompatibility.

I went through the Laravel documentation to check how to set a route alias to the package.provider.auth route and set it to package.auth, I couldn't find anything that allows me to add some alias name to a pre-defined named route. So, I wrote a PR to bring the functionality to Laravel routing system.

Something like:

// Route::alias($alias, $namedRoute)
Route::alias('package.auth', `package.provider.auth`);

The mentioned PR is still needing a lot of work to be done, something like

• Decide if the alias name is already existing as a named route, should we override it or throw some exceptions.
• Decide if a named route can have a multiple aliases
• Printing the related aliases alongside to the named routes in the route:list artisan command

I just wanted to check some feedbacks from the community if the functionality is worth to be implemented, or it's a kind of over load for a custom situation - my described previous situation -.

Thank you.

[shaedrich]

Decide if a named route can have a multiple aliases

If a route can have an alias, does it really matter if it has one or multiple?

[7snovic]

Not really sure, but maybe. Actually, that's why I am trying to wait for some feedback / edge-cases

[shaedrich]

Sure, you usually don't want more aliases for one route than you have routes in total (assuming, you have more than one or two routes), because you don't want this memory overhead, but for it to become a problem, it has to be a considerable amount, and in my opinion, at this point this would be the problem of the developer using it not the one implementing it.

[7snovic]

Yes, sure, it's a valid point that it's the end-user responsibility.