Quickstart Tutorial

This tutorial focuses on getting you started with stancl/tenancy 3.x quickly. It implements multi-database tenancy & domain identification. If you need a different implementation, then that's absolutely possible with this package and it's very easy to refactor to a different implementation.

We recommend following this tutorial just to get things working so that you can play with the package. Then if you need to, you can refactor the details of the multi-tenancy implementation (e.g. single-database tenancy, request data identification, etc).

Installation

First, require the package using composer:

composer require stancl/tenancy

Then, run the tenancy:install command:

php artisan tenancy:install

This will create a few files: migrations, config file, route file and a service provider.

Let's run the migrations:

php artisan migrate

Register the service provider in config/app.php. Make sure it's on the same position as in the code snippet below:

/*
 * Application Service Providers...
 */
App\Providers\AppServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\AuthServiceProvider::class,
// App\Providers\BroadcastServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\EventServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\RouteServiceProvider::class,
App\Providers\TenancyServiceProvider::class, // <-- here

Creating a tenant model

Now you need to create a Tenant model. The package comes with a default Tenant model that has many features, but it attempts to be mostly unopinonated and as such, we need to create a custom model to use domains & databases. Create the file app/Models/Tenant.php like this:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Stancl\Tenancy\Database\Models\Tenant as BaseTenant;
use Stancl\Tenancy\Contracts\TenantWithDatabase;
use Stancl\Tenancy\Database\Concerns\HasDatabase;
use Stancl\Tenancy\Database\Concerns\HasDomains;

class Tenant extends BaseTenant implements TenantWithDatabase
{
    use HasDatabase, HasDomains;
}

Please note: if you have the models anywhere else, you should adjust the code and commands of this tutorial accordingly.

Now we need to tell the package to use this custom model. Open the config/tenancy.php file and modify the line below:

'tenant_model' => \App\Models\Tenant::class,

Events

The defaults will work out of the box here, but a short explanation will be useful. The TenancyServiceProvider file in your app/Providers directory maps tenancy events to listeners. By default, when a tenant is created, it runs a JobPipeline (a smart thing that's part of this package) which makes sure that the CreateDatabase, MigrateDatabase and optionally other jobs (e.g. SeedDatabase) are ran sequentially.

In other words, it creates & migrates the tenant's database after he's created — and it does this in the correct order, because normal event-listener mapping would execute the listeners in some stupid order that would result in things like the database being migrated before it's created, or seeded before it's migrated.

Central routes

We'll make a small change to the app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php file. Specifically, we'll make sure that central routes are registered on central domains only.

protected function mapWebRoutes()
{
    foreach ($this->centralDomains() as $domain) {
        Route::middleware('web')
            ->domain($domain)
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->group(base_path('routes/web.php'));
    }
}

protected function mapApiRoutes()
{
    foreach ($this->centralDomains() as $domain) {
        Route::prefix('api')
            ->domain($domain)
            ->middleware('api')
            ->namespace($this->namespace)
            ->group(base_path('routes/api.php'));
    }
}

protected function centralDomains(): array
{
    return config('tenancy.central_domains');
}

Call these methods manually from your RouteServiceProvider's boot() method, instead of the $this->routes() calls.

public function boot()
{
    $this->configureRateLimiting();

    $this->routes(function () {
        $this->mapApiRoutes();
        $this->mapWebRoutes();
    });
}

Central domains

Now we need to actually specify the central domains. A central domain is a domain that serves your "central app" content, e.g. the landing page where tenants sign up. Open the config/tenancy.php file and add them in:

'central_domains' => [
    'saas.test', // Add the ones that you use. I use this one with Laravel Valet.
],

If you're using Laravel Sail, no changes are needed, default values are good to go:

'central_domains' => [
    '127.0.0.1',
    'localhost',
],

Tenant routes

Your tenant routes will look like this by default:

Route::middleware([
    'web',
    InitializeTenancyByDomain::class,
    PreventAccessFromCentralDomains::class,
])->group(function () {
    Route::get('/', function () {
        return 'This is your multi-tenant application. The id of the current tenant is ' . tenant('id');
    });
});

These routes will only be accessible on tenant (non-central) domains — the PreventAccessFromCentralDomains middleware enforces that.

Let's make a small change to dump all the users in the database, so that we can actually see multi-tenancy working. Open the file routes/tenant.php and apply the modification below:

Route::get('/', function () {
    dd(\App\Models\User::all());
    return 'This is your multi-tenant application. The id of the current tenant is ' . tenant('id');
});

Migrations

To have users in tenant databases, let's move the users table migration (the file database/migrations/2014_10_12_000000_create_users_table.php or similar) to database/migrations/tenant. This will prevent the table from being created in the central database, and it will be instead created in the tenant database when a tenant is created — thanks to our event setup.

Creating tenants

Note: If you're using Laravel Sail, ensure that DB_USERNAME has the necessary permissions to create databases. You can grant access to users by running grant create on *.* to 'sail'@'%'; in the MySQL console.

For testing purposes, we'll create a tenant in tinker — no need to waste time creating controllers and views for now.

$ php artisan tinker
>>> $tenant1 = App\Models\Tenant::create(['id' => 'foo']);
>>> $tenant1->domains()->create(['domain' => 'foo.localhost']);
>>>
>>> $tenant2 = App\Models\Tenant::create(['id' => 'bar']);
>>> $tenant2->domains()->create(['domain' => 'bar.localhost']);

Now we'll create a user inside each tenant's database:

App\Models\Tenant::all()->runForEach(function () {
    App\Models\User::factory()->create();
});

Trying it out

Now we visit foo.localhost in our browser, replace localhost with one of the values of central_domains in the file config/tenancy.php as modified previously. We should see a dump of the users table where we see some user. If we visit bar.localhost, we should see a different user.

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