laravel-data

Laravel Data (spatie/laravel-data v4)

A data object describes your data once and is used everywhere: as a validated form request replacement (input), as an API resource (output), as a typed DTO inside the app, and as a source for TypeScript definitions.

use Spatie\LaravelData\Data;

class SongData extends Data
{
    public function __construct(
        public string $title,
        public string $artist,
    ) {}
}

Installation & conventions

composer require spatie/laravel-data
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\LaravelData\LaravelDataServiceProvider" --tag="data-config"

• Generate classes with php artisan make:data SongData — default location app/Data, default suffix Data (configurable under commands.make in config/data.php).
• Keep data classes in app/Data (or add other directories to structure_caching.directories in the config).
• Prefer constructor promoted properties; plain public properties also work.
• Two lighter base classes exist: Resource (output only — no validation/authorization, faster) and Dto (input only — no transformation features).

Creating data objects

::from() accepts nearly anything — arrays, Eloquent models, requests, JSON strings, Arrayables, objects:

SongData::from(['title' => 'Never gonna give you up', 'artist' => 'Rick Astley']);
SongData::from(Song::findOrFail($id));   // model attributes, casts, accessors work
SongData::from($request);                 // + validates the request payload
SongData::from('{"title":"...","artist":"..."}');
SongData::optional(null);                 // returns null instead of throwing

Magical creation methods

Add public static methods starting with from to customize creation per type (must not be named from itself). The best matching method wins over the default normalizers:

public static function fromModel(Song $song): self
{
    return new self("{$song->title} ({$song->year})", $song->artist);
}

Collections