Install Eloquent with composer

All pages in the this chapter assume that you have some experience with composer. Therefor it is not a manual to learn composer or even Laravel's Eloquent.

config.php, activate composer autoload

In folder application\config:

$config['composer_autoload'] = true;

Now install Laravel's eloquent:

Do the following in the application folder !!!

Make sure you have the following entries in the composer.json file:

{
  "license": "MIT",
  "require": {
    "illuminate/database": "^5.8",
    "illuminate/events": "^5.8"
  },
  ...
  "autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
      "App\\": "",
      "Db\\": "database/"
    }
  }
  ...
}

• The App namespace root is pointing to the application folder itself.
• The Db namespace root is pointing to the database folder in the application folder.

Install the dependencies

composer install

Database connection

We add the database connection information to the database.php file in the config folder of the application:

<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

use Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager as Capsule;
use Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher;
use Illuminate\Container\Container;

$active_group = 'default';
$query_builder = TRUE;

$db['default'] = array(
    'dsn'   => '',
    'hostname' => 'localhost',
    'username' => 'db_user_name',
    'password' => 'db_password',
    'database' => 'cars_db',
    'dbdriver' => 'mysqli',
    'dbprefix' => '',
    'pconnect' => FALSE,
    'db_debug' => TRUE,
    'cache_on' => FALSE,
    'cachedir' => '',
    'char_set' => 'utf8',
    'dbcollat' => 'utf8_general_ci',
    'swap_pre' => '',
    'autoinit' => TRUE,
    'encrypt' => FALSE,
    'compress' => FALSE,
    'stricton' => FALSE,
    'failover' => array()
);

/**
 * Capsule from Laravel
 */
$capsule = new Capsule;
$capsule->addConnection([
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => $db['default']['hostname'],
    'database'  => $db['default']['database'],
    'username'  => $db['default']['username'],
    'password'  => $db['default']['password'],
    'charset'   => $db['default']['char_set'],
    'collation' => $db['default']['dbcollat'],
    'prefix'    => $db['default']['dbprefix'],
]);

// Event dispatcher, not required, but very handy
$capsule->setEventDispatcher(new Dispatcher(new Container())); 

$capsule->setAsGlobal();
$capsule->bootEloquent();

// Query logging, you can also commented it out, when you don't need it
$capsule->connection()->enableQueryLog();

A little bit more work to finish it

• Create in the application folder of your application a new folder named database.
• Create in the just created database folder a folder named Eloquent (mind the first capital!)
• Create in the just created 'Eloquent` folder a folder named 'Models' (mind the first capital!)

Now it should look like this:

|- application
|--- config
|--- controllers
|--- core
|--- database
|------ Eloquent
|---------- Models
|--- helpers
|--- hooks
|--- ...

Now head over to the next chapter, to learn how to use it.