Creating Title Slugs with Laravel

When storing posts in the database a typical pattern for retrieving it is to create a unique “slug” based on the title. This gives users SEO-friendly way to access it through the URL.

For example, a typical URL might look like, awesome.com/post/1. The id in the URL gives no hints at what the content is about and is not user-friendly. Slugs, on the other hand, are designed to turn this into awesome.com/post/awesome-article

Creating slugs from an existing string is easy in Laravel as it includes a helper for just this use case:

$title = str_slug('Awesome Title', '-');

The results of this would be a lower-cased string with a dash (-) separator between the words:

awesome-title

While this is a huge help it doesn’t account for situations where you have two pieces of content with the same title.

So how to check two slugs are the same

<?php

namespace App\Services;

use App\Post;

class Slug
{
    /**
     * @param $title
     * @param int $id
     * @return string
     * @throws \Exception
     */
    public function createSlug($title, $id = 0)
    {
        // Normalize the title
        $slug = str_slug($title);

        // Get any that could possibly be related.
        // This cuts the queries down by doing it once.
        $allSlugs = $this->getRelatedSlugs($slug, $id);

        // If we haven't used it before then we are all good.
        if (! $allSlugs->contains('slug', $slug)){
            return $slug;
        }

        // Just append numbers like a savage until we find not used.
        for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
            $newSlug = $slug.'-'.$i;
            if (! $allSlugs->contains('slug', $newSlug)) {
                return $newSlug;
            }
        }

        throw new \Exception('Can not create a unique slug');
    }

    protected function getRelatedSlugs($slug, $id = 0)
    {
        return Post::select('slug')->where('slug', 'like', $slug.'%')
            ->where('id', '<>', $id)
            ->get();
    }
}

How to create slug?

// On create
$post->slug = $slug->createSlug($request->title);

How to get post from a by its slug:

Route::get('/post/{slug}', function(){
    $post = \App\Post::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail(); 
});

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Kshitij Soni