Illuminate\Foundation\Application useNamespace() method?

[AdamGaskins]

Whenever I start a new application, I like to move my app/ folder to src/App so I can use a structure based on Spatie's Laravel Beyond Crud. In order to do this I have to extend \Illuminate\Foundation\Application:

// src/App/Application.php
namespace App;

class Application extends \Illuminate\Foundation\Application
{
    protected $namespace = 'App\\';
}

And then use that in my bootstrap/app.php file, while also updating the app path:

$app = (new App\Application(
    realpath(__DIR__.'/../')
))
    ->useAppPath(__DIR__ . '/../src/App');

I'm sure there's all kinds of advanced things you can do by extending Application, but it seems a bit overkill just for changing the namespace. I would love to have a useNamespace() method on the Application class, which would let me do this:

$app = (new \Illuminate\Foundation\Application(
    realpath(__DIR__.'/../')
))
    ->useAppPath(__DIR__ . '/../src/App')
    ->useNamespace('App\\');

I'd be happy to open a PR if I'm not the only one, but thought I'd open a discussion first. Definitely a small thing, but it would make starting a new project that much cleaner :)

[legecha]

In Laravel Beyond CRUD, it hsa this paragraph:

Unfortunately there's one more thing you need to do in order for Laravel to fully support your custom namespaces. By default, Laravel will look at the app/ folder containing all App\ code, and this default is hard coded in the \Illuminate\Foundation\Application class.

But I don't see where this happens (please point that out if I've missed it!). What I do see though is this:

framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php

Lines 1383 to 1400 in 6db59af

	public function getNamespace()
	{
	if (! is_null($this->namespace)) {
	return $this->namespace;
	}
	$composer = json_decode(file_get_contents($this->basePath('composer.json')), true);
	foreach ((array) data_get($composer, 'autoload.psr-4') as $namespace => $path) {
	foreach ((array) $path as $pathChoice) {
	if (realpath($this->path()) === realpath($this->basePath($pathChoice))) {
	return $this->namespace = $namespace;
	}
	}
	}
	throw new RuntimeException('Unable to detect application namespace.');
	}

It appears the namespace will be grabbed from composer.json in the getNamespace() method. I realised this after I created the new Application.php, added my namespaces to composer.json in the psr-4 autoload section and ran composer dump-autoload, but actually forgot to update bootstrap/app.php to use it!

I had a quick look back at the history of Application.php and this code seems to have been in there for over half a decade.

[AdamGaskins]

Oh interesting! My initial reaction is that, even though I'm sure the performance impact is negligible, I would like to be able to set the namespace explicitly so it doesn't have to read a file, looping through the namespaces etc. every request. But, I guess this has already been happening in the background without me even noticing so 🤷🏻‍♂️

Great find!