When you use Route::method()
like that you're using what's called a "facade". The Route
class is the facade in this context.
If you take a look at Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route
you'll see that it provides a single static method called getFacadeAccessor
, which returns a string router
. It's this string that references an instance of the Illuminate\Routing\Router
class in the IoC container.
During it's setup Laravel creates an instance of this class and stores it with router
as kind of like a key.
So when you do Route::get(...)
, under the hood Laravel is using the facade accessor to find an instance of the Router class that's already been created and calls the get
method on it. It uses dynamic programming to achieve this, have a look at the Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade
class for details of what's going on there, in particular the __callStatic
method which is where it all starts.
So, calling Route::get()
:
- You're actually calling
Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route::get
- No such method exists on that class, or the
Facade
class it extends, so the __callStatic
method is run.
- The underlying
Facade
class calls static::getFacadeRoot()
which if you follow the logic, will get you an instance of Illuminate\Routing\Router
- Finally, the
__callStatic
method calls $instance->$method(...$args);
where $instance
is the instance of the router, and $method
is get
and $args
is what you passed to Route::get(...);
- So when you call
Route::get('route', 'Controller@method');
you actually end up calling get('route', 'Controller@method')
on an instance of Illuminate\Routing\Router
. Notice, you're not actually calling a static method.