Introduction

What is multi-tenancy?

Multi-tenancy is the ability to provide your service to multiple users (tenants) from a single hosted instance of the application. This is contrasted with deploying the application separately for each user.

You may find this talk insightful: https://multitenantlaravel.com/. Simply going through the slides will give you 80% of the value of the talk in under five minutes.

Note that if you just want to, say, scope todo tasks to the current user, there's no need to use a multi-tenancy package. Just use calls like auth()->user()->tasks(). This is the simplest form of multi-tenancy.

This package is built around the idea that multi-tenancy usually means letting tenants have their own users which have their own resources, e.g. todo tasks. Not just users having tasks.

Types of multi-tenancy

There are two types of multi-tenancy:

• single-database tenancy — tenants share one database and their data is separated using e.g. where tenant_id = 1 clauses.
• multi-database tenancy — each tenant has his own database

This package lets you do both, though it focuses more on multi-database tenancy because that type requires more work on the side of the package and less work on your side. Whereas for single-database tenancy you're provided with a class that keeps track of the current tenant and model traits — and the rest is up to you.

Modes of multi-tenancy

The tenancy "mode" is a unique property of this package. In previous versions, this package was intended primarily for automatic tenancy, which means that after a tenant was identified, things like database connections, caches, filesystems, queues etc were switched to that tenant's context — his data completely isolated from the rest.

In the current version, we're also making manual tenancy a first-class feature. We provide you with things like model traits if you wish to scope the data yourself.

Tenant identification

For your application to be tenant-aware, a tenant has to be identified. This package ships with many identification middleware classes. You may identify tenants by domain, subdomain, domain OR subdomain at the same time, path or request data.