On Service Providers and Laravel's life cycle

In this blog post I talk about Laravel's Service Providers and about its life cycles. In brief, a Laravel application is bootstrapped (started) whenever a webrequest hits index.php in the public folder, or when an artisan command is executed. Tough both the index.php and artisan file work very similarly, I will only talk about index.php. When the index.php file is called it registers the autoloader. After that Laravel's Application is initiated and stored in the $app variable which is used to construct a kernel that manages the input and output of our app. After handling the input by our $kernel it returns a $response object which is send back to our visitor.

Let's rewind a bit, there are four₁ important things that are done in the index.php:

1. The autoloader is registered
2. Laravel's Application class is initiated and stored in $app
3. A kernel is constructed using the $app's Service Container.
4. The kernel handles our input and returns a response.

The goal of this blog post is to explain the inner workings of Laravel's life cycle. The next section describes how the Applicaiton class works

Laravel's Application object

When a Laravel application is bootstrapped a Applicaiton object is made in bootstrap/app.php. This object can be found in vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application. There are two important bits about this class: it extends the Illuminate\Container\Container and implements a ApplicationContract.

Registration phase

Bootstrap phase

So how do Service Providers work?

Footnotes:

1. Actually there is a fifth step where we terminate the kernel which will call the terminate method on any active TerminableMiddleware and terminates the $app instance.