Environment specific Service Providers and Facades in Laravel

I often work with 3rd party app in my Laravel Projects, some of them are for example barryvdh/laravel-debugbar, barryvdh/laravel-translation-manager or aaronlord/laroute.

Now I show you how you can load only specific facades an service providers for development.

Let’s build this up.

In Laravel there is a .env file which has a variable called `APP_ENV`.  

That’s exactly what we need. If the value is ‘local’ we are in development if its ‘testing’ or ‘production’ we are naturally not (More about environments in Laravel).

Create a new ServiceProvider called `LocalEnvironmentServiceProvider` with artisan:

php artisan make:provider LocalEnvironmentServiceProvider

Then extend it like the following example (change the namespace for your app):

Notice: The service provider use the following syntax to check if we are in development.

if (App::environment('local')) {
    // ..
}

Now you just have to add this Service Provider in your app.php under providers and…

'providers'       => [
        // ..

        /*
         * Dev Only Providers:
         */
        App\Providers\LocalEnvironmentServiceProvider::class,

        // ..
],

…thats it! Now if you want to use a serivce provider or a facade alias only in dev add it to the LocalEnvironmentServiceProvider.