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...

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.

Building on @Banfords answer, with PHP7 constants can now be arrays:

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    /**
     * The possible genders a user can be.
     */
    const GENDER = [
        'Male',
        'Female',
        'Unspecified'
    ];

...