Tricking Laravel Into Auto-Loading Routes

As the size of the application grows, so does the number of routes. After some time, the route management becomes a challenge in itself. To combat that challenge, here is a way to trick laravel to autoload application routes.

First we will create an auto-loader function in AppServiceProvider

private function autoloadRoutes(): void
{
  foreach (File::allFiles(base_path(self::ROUTE_MODULE_DIR)) as $file) {
    Route::middleware(['web'])->group(function () use ($file): void {
      $this->loadRoutesFrom(base_path(self::ROUTE_MODULE_DIR) . $file->getFilename());
    });
  }
}

Here, ROUTE_MODULE_DIR is a constant declaration in the class.

const ROUTE_MODULE_DIR = 'routes/modules/';

Once the function is available, we can add the function to the register method of the AppServiceProvider

public function register(): void
{
  $this->autoloadRoutes();
}

And that's it. Now, whenever you create a new file with routes in the routes/module directory, it will be auto loaded in the application.