Override/Extend Functions of Laravel Packages

Let's get a bit more practical. Quite often, you want to use a Laravel package but slightly change its functionality. You can't edit anything in /vendor because package updates would wipe out your changes, right? So, I will show you what to do, with two examples.

Example 1: Override Relationship Method

Here's a situation we had at our own Laravel Daily. We're using the spatie/laravel-tags package, which is configured by just adding a Trait to our Model:

app/Models/Course.php:

use Spatie\Tags\HasTags;
 
// ...
 
class Course extends Model
{
    use HasTags; 
 
    // ...

Inside that trait, there's a polymorphic relation method:

vendor/spatie/laravel-tags/src/HasTags.php:

trait HasTags {
    // ...
 
    public function tags(): MorphToMany
    {
        return $this
            ->morphToMany(self::getTagClassName(), $this->getTaggableMorphName())
            ->using($this->getPivotModelClassName())
            ->ordered();
    }
}

But what we needed in our project was to automatically...