Laravel : Repositories the right way

If you want to make your application testable you should really use Repositories in order to perform unit tests without touching the database.

In my case I was programming a Fantasy Football game and I will stick with the Team model.

The Team model has some attributes eg : Name, Colors and Formation which was an enumerator of various Formations.

On your app if you accessed the model directly on your Controller than testing the controller and trying to bypass a database call would be impossible and database calls are expensive. Imagine if you had a gulp task on elixir to perform unit tests on ‘watch’, every time you saved something that would do a call to database eg :

<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Offside\Models\Team;

class HomeController extends Controller {

    protected $team;
    public function __construct(Team $team){
        $this->team = $team;
    }

   /**
    * Show the application dashboard to the user.
    *
    * @return Response
    */
    public function getPlayers()
    {
        return $this->team->players;
    }

}

Everytime you hit getPlayers() you would make a call to database.

To avoid that you should create a repository and inject it on your controller by passing it to the Controller constructor.

You need to create an interface so it can be mocked eg :

<?php namespace Offside\Repo;

interface TeamRepositoryInterface {
    public function getPlayers();
}

//And then you should create a concrete implementation of that interface eg : 

<?php namespace Offside\Repo;

use Offside\Models\Team;
use Offside\Random;

class TeamRepository implements TeamRepositoryInterface{

    protected $team = null;
    public function __construct(Team $team){
        $this->team = $team;
    }