$ show spatie/laravel-fractal
Spatie's Laravel Fractal package provides a fluent, Laravel-native wrapper around the League Fractal library for transforming data into API-friendly formats. It offers a global `fractal()` helper function, a Facade, and a Laravel Collection macro, allowing developers to easily serialize collections, items, and paginated results with custom transformers. The architecture is a standard Laravel package: a service provider registers the config file, binds a singleton to the container, and bootstraps the Collection macro. The core `Fractal` class extends `Spatie\Fractalistic\Fractal` and adds Laravel-specific features: automatic parsing of `include`, `exclude`, and `fields` query parameters from the request, configurable default serializers and paginators, and a `respond()` method that returns a `JsonResponse` with flexible status code, headers, and encoding options. The package also includes an Artisan command `make:transformer` to generate transformer classes. External dependencies are `league/fractal`, `spatie/fractalistic`, `illuminate/support`, `illuminate/contracts`, and `nesbot/carbon`. The codebase is clean, well-tested with Pest, and follows Spatie's typical high-quality standards, though it is a relatively thin integration layer rather than a complex standalone library.
The LLM identified 2 files worth highlighting for reuse:
The `respond()` method in `Spatie\Fractal\Fractal` demonstrates a robust pattern for accepting parameters that can be either simple values (int, array) or callbacks. This allows callers to pass a status code, headers, and encoding options either as direct values or as closures that modify a `JsonResponse` instance. The implementation handles all combinations via callable wrappers, making the API highly flexible without method overloading. This pattern is reusable in any Laravel package that needs to return a configurable response, as it cleanly separates the transformation logic from the response construction.
The `packageBooted()` method adds a `transformWith` macro to `Illuminate\Support\Collection`, enabling direct transformation of Laravel collections. This is a clean example of extending core Laravel functionality via service providers without modifying framework files. The pattern is straightforward and can be adapted to add similar macros to other Laravel components (e.g., Eloquent models, paginators) in a reusable way.