Service: Most Misunderstood Word in Laravel?

The word "service" is often used in the Laravel community, but is it a "design pattern"?

Yes and no.

It is a pattern in the sense that it's a typical approach to offload the logic from the Controller to "somewhere else", that "somewhere" being the Service class.

However, identically to the Action classes, Services are not a core Laravel function, so there's no php artisan make:service, and developers can name/structure them however they want.

I've seen two main use cases for Service classes:

Case 1. Something like UserService: A class with multiple methods around a certain Model or other subject (more "loose" pattern)

Case 2. Something like StripeService: A class that helps to work with external functionality or a 3rd party library that can be replaced with another library in the future (more "strict" pattern)

And let's see both in action.

"Loose" Services Example

A typical simple example is this:

app/Http/Controllers/UserController.php:

use App\Http\Requests\StoreUserRequest;
use App\Services\UserService;
 
class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function store(StoreUserRequest $request, UserService $userService)
    {
        $userService->store($request->validated());
 
        return redirect()->route('users.index');
    }
 
    // ...
}

Then, inside that UserService class, you have methods to store users, update users, and perform other operations related to the User model.

app/Services/UserService.php:

namespace App\Services;
 
class UserService {
 
    public function store(array $userData): User
    {
        $user = User::create($userData);
 
        $user->roles()->sync($userData['roles']);
 
        // More actions with that user: let's say, 5+ more lines of code
        // - Upload avatar
        // - Email to the user
        // - Notify admins about new user
        // - Create some data for that user
        // - and more...
 
        return $user;
    }
 
    public function update(array $userData, User $user): User
    {
        $user->update($userData);
        $user->roles()->sync($userData['roles']);
 
        // Also, more actions with that user
    }
}

Wait, How Does That "Magic" Type-Hinting Work?

So, you've seen this code...