Newing up models, in style

So recently I submitted an idea to improve the Laravel Framework by allowing for the instantiation (or "newing up") of models more expressively. Although it's a very small, and perhaps trivial thing to accomplish, I've had a number of occassions where it proved to be quite useful.

There are many ways the same thing can be achieved. You are probably aware of PHP's default way of instantiating a class, and then retrieving some details:

use App\Models\User;

$user = new User();
$fillable = $user->getFillable();

return $fillable;

Although this is fine, I am personally a fan of chaining methods to allow for a single line. This is what I personally use these days to accomplish this:

use App\Models\User;

return User::model()->getFillable();

Is it really worth it? That's pretty much up to you to decide. I found this little helper quite useful in a number of occasions, when I just wanted an instance of the model itself, regardless of any attributes.

It does offer a couple of benefits; it easier to find all occurrences of models being instantiated throughout your code (now you can just search for ::model() instead) and it allows for the instantiation through class names (i.e. $class::model()).

The method is defined as illustrated below. You can add this method to your base model, or use a trait or however you prefer.

/**
 * Create a new Eloquent model instance.
 *
 * @param  array  $attributes
 * @return static
 */
public static function model(array $attributes = []): static
{
    return new static($attributes);
}

💡 In fact, did you know that Laravel actually provide a similar way of instantiating other classes, such as JsonResource::make() or View::make()? So my idea isn't entirely original after all. 🤔

Conclusion

In any case, it's a very simple way to "new up" a model without having to dance the parentheses parade 🕺 (I'm exaggerating, of course).