Although helpers are an important part of Laravel, the documentation doesn't really touch on creating them. Fortunately, doing so it fairly easy.

Here I'm building a helper for formatting dates for the HTML5 datetime-local form input. First we define the helper function in app\Helpers.php:

1<?php
2
3use Carbon\Carbon;
4
5if (!function_exists('format_date')) {
6    function format_date(string $date)
7    {
8        return Carbon::parse($date, config('app.timezone'))->format('Y-m-d\TH:i:s');
9    }
10}

Then we create a service provider to load them:

1<?php
2
3namespace App\Providers;
4
5use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
6
7class HelperServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
8{
9    /**
10     * Bootstrap the application services.
11     *
12     * @return void
13     */
14    public function boot()
15    {
16        //
17    }
18
19    /**
20     * Register the application services.
21     *
22     * @return void
23     */
24    public function register()
25    {
26        //
27        require_once app_path() . '/Helpers.php';
28    }
29}

Finally,we register the service provider in config/app.php:

1    'providers' => [
2
3       ...
4        App\Providers\HelperServiceProvider::class,
5   ],

Of course, once you have this all set up for one helper, it's easy to add more because they can all go in app/Helpers.php.

Creating your own helpers is a good way of refactoring unwanted logic out of your Blade templates or controllers and making it more reusable and maintainable, particularly for things like formatting dates or strings.