Where to put/how to handle enums in Laravel?

🚨 Update: PHP 8.1 has finally brought native support for enums! 🥳🎉

See more here:

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-enums https://php.watch/versions/8.1/enums https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.enumerations.php

My original answer below no longer applies, but if you're working with an older version of PHP...

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Original answer

You have several options for handling enums. Before we look at a few though, I would first strongly encourage you not to use the DB enum column type.

Database enums are problematic for a number of reasons. I suggest reading this article for example:

http://komlenic.com/244/8-reasons-why-mysqls-enum-data-type-is-evil/

So with that let's look at a few other options.

Using Laravel config

Since you're using Laravel, one very simple option is to stick an array of options in a config file.

Say you create a new file config/enums.php with the following:

return [
    'phone_types' => [
        'CELL' => "Cellular",
        'HOME' => "Home",
        'WORK' => "Work",
    ]
];

You can now access config('enums.phone_types') anywhere in your code, including your Blade template.

Using a PHP package

@Banford's answer shows how to do basic enum-type behavior with class constants. If you like that approach, I recommend looking at this article and package which builds on this concept to provide strongly type enums:

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-enums

https://github.com/spatie/enum

You would create a class like this:

/**
 * @method static self cell()
 * @method static self home()
 * @method static self work()
 */
class PhoneTypes extends Enum
{
}

And now you can call PhoneTypes::home() in your app. Check out the documentation for that package to see how you can create a map of values, if you want.

Using DB relationships

If you really want to manage your options in the database, I'd create a separate phone_types database table and create a relationship with your customers table. This is still a much better option than using enum column type.

I disagree with the accepted answer here. I feel that enums can be very useful for this kind of thing. I prefer to treat enums as types, and implement the methods you need on the Enum base class to give you the functionality you need such as getting a dictionary.

My simple example below:

abstract class PhoneType extends Enum {
    const Cell = "Cellular";
    const Home = "Home";
    const Work = "Work";
}

abstract class Enum {
    static function getKeys(){
        $class = new ReflectionClass(get_called_class());
        return array_keys($class->getConstants());
    }
}

Example usage:

PhoneType::getKeys();

See PHP and Enumerations for further details and a more in depth example.