How can I override Laravel Facade methods?

Question

I want to override the Laravels' Mail's classes facade method send (just intercept it forcing some checks and then if it passes triggering parent::send())

What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

A Facade doesn't work like that. It's essentially kind of like a wrapper class that calls the underlying class that it represents.

The Mail facade doesn't actually have a send method. When you do Mail::send(), under the hood, the "facade accessor" is used to reference an instance of the Illuminate\Mail\Mailer class bound in the IoC container. It's on that object the send method is called.

The way in which you can achieve what you're after is actually a little bit trickier than it seems. What you can do is:

• Write your own implementation of Mailer, extending Illuminate\Mail\Mailer, in which you can override the send method, implement your checks and call parent::send().
• Write your own service provider (Extending Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider), in particular re-implement the register method. It should create an instance of your own Mailer in place of Laravel's own. (You can copy most of the code from Laravel's register method).
• Now, in your config/app.php file, in the providers array, replace Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider::class, with your own provider.

That should let you hook into Laravel's Mail functionality.

---

For more information, you can take a look at the following question/answer which achieves a similar thing. It extends the Mail functionality to add a new transport driver, but it takes a similar approach in that it provides its own Mailer implementation and service provider.

Add a new transport driver to Laravel's Mailer

---

app/MyMailer/Mailer.php

<?php

namespace App\MyMailer;

class Mailer extends \Illuminate\Mail\Mailer
{
    public function send($view, array $data = [], $callback = null)
    {
        // Do your checks

        return parent::send($view, $data, $callback);
    }
}

app/MyMailer/MailServiceProvider.php (Most of the code copied from Laravel's MailServiceProvider class)

<?php

namespace App\MyMailer;

class MailServiceProvider extends \Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider
{
    public function register()
    {
        $this->registerSwiftMailer();

        $this->app->singleton('mailer', function ($app) {
            // This is YOUR mailer - notice there are no `use`s at the top which
            // Looks for a Mailer class in this namespace
            $mailer = new Mailer(
                $app['view'], $app['swift.mailer'], $app['events']
            );

            $this->setMailerDependencies($mailer, $app);


            $from = $app['config']['mail.from'];

            if (is_array($from) && isset($from['address'])) {
                $mailer->alwaysFrom($from['address'], $from['name']);
            }

            $to = $app['config']['mail.to'];

            if (is_array($to) && isset($to['address'])) {
                $mailer->alwaysTo($to['address'], $to['name']);
            }

            return $mailer;
        });
    }
}

config/app.php (In the providers array)

//...
// Illuminate\Mail\MailServiceProvider::class,
App\MyMailer\MailServiceProvider::class,
//...