Dynamic routes in Laravel

We’ve seen how to create a route in the routes/web.php file:

Route::get('/dogs', function () {
    return view('dogs');
})->name('dogs');

This is a static route, that responds on the /dogs URL.

Now suppose you want to create a page for each single dog, maybe you’ll fill that with a description, an image, whatever.

You can’t create a static route for each dog in the database, because you don’t know the name of the dog.

Imagine you have 2 dogs Max and Daisy, this would display a “dog” view (which we don’t have yet) on the /dogs/max and /dogs/daisy:

Route::get('/dogs/max', function () {
    return view('dog');
})

Route::get('/dogs/daisy', function () {
    return view('dog');
})

What we do instead is, we have a dynamic segment in the URL:

Route::get('/dogs/{slug}', function () {
    return view('dog');
})

slug is a term that identifies a URL portion in lowercase and without spaces, for example if the name of the dog is Max, the slug is max.

Now we can pass the slug value to the callback function (the function that’s called when the route is hit), and inside the function we can pass it to the view:

Route::get('/dogs/{slug}', function ($slug) {
    return view('dog', ['slug' => $slug]);
})

Now the $slug variable is available inside the Blade template.

But we want to retrieve the actual dog data. We have the slug, which we can imagine it’s stored in the database when we add the dog.

To do that, we use the Dog model in the route, like this:

use App\Models\Dog;

Route::get('/dogs/{slug}', function ($slug) {
    $dog = Dog::find($slug)
    return view('dog', ['dog' => $dog]);
})