Create a custom helper in Laravel

1. Go to app/Helpers directory within your Laravel project. If this directory doesn’t exist, create it.

2. Create a new PHP file in the app/Helpers directory. ex. MyHelpers.php

3. Create the custom function. Let’s say we want to make a function that generates a random ID string

function GenerateID($length = 15)
{
  $num_and_let = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
  
  $randID = ''

  for($a = 0; $a < length; $a++) {
    $randID .= $num_and_let[rand(0, strlen($num_and_let) - 1)];
  }
  return $randID;  
}

4. Add the helper file (MyHelpers.php) in the “auto-load” section. You can do this by adding an autoload entry to the composer.json file in your Laravel application.

"autoload": {
     "files": [
	"app/Helpers/MyHelpers.php"
      ]
  }

5. Run the following command in your terminal to regenerate the Composer autoloader files

composer dump-autoload

6. Use the custom helper function GenerateID() anywhere in your Laravel application by calling the function

 $randomID = GenerateID(15);