Simple HTTP Response Trait in Laravel

Building APIs in Laravel (or more generally in PHP) often implies responding with some sort of JSON data. The format of this data should ideally be standardized. I try to follow the JSON API standard loosely, though I'm flexible on the exact implementation.

My personal flavor of this typically responds with something similar to this for a successful request:

// Failed request
return response([
        'success' => true,
        'data' => $data,
        'message' => $message,
    ], 200);

Or for a failed request:

// Failed request
return response([
        'success' => false,
        'message' => $message,
    ], 422);

Note The 422 Unprocessable Entity status seems to be quite popular in the Laravel ecosystem so that's what I use for generic error codes.

Repeating the above snippets over and over for a myriad endpoints can get tedious, and is a good example of code that can be extracted into some sort of reusable entity.

Traits to the rescue!

Traits hold a special place in my heart. I like how they can be used to handle multiple inheritance but also to share some similar piece of functionality across different classes.

I keep my traits in app/Traits, which is standard practice in a Laravel project. In this particular case I named my trait RespondsWithHttpStatus (yeah, I know, it's always hard to name things). And here's how such a trait might be constructed:

trait RespondsWithHttpStatus
{
    protected function success($message, $data = [], $status = 200)
    {
        return response([
            'success' => true,
            'data' => $data,
            'message' => $message,
        ], $status);
    }

    protected function failure($message, $status = 422)
    {
        return response([
            'success' => false,
            'message' => $message,
        ], $status);
    }
}

Usage

You can import this trait into any class or method where you need to return an HTTP response.

use App\Traits\RespondsWithHttpStatus;

class MyClass
{
    use RespondsWithHttpStatus;
    ...

Respond with success

return $this->success(
    'Here is your data',
    [
        'field1' => 'Field 1 data',
        'field2' => 'Field 2 data',
    ]
);

Response 200 OK

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "field1": "Field 1 data",
    "field2": "Field 2 data",
  },
  "message": ""
}

Respond with failure

return $this->failure('Invalid token');

Response 422 Unprocessable Entity

{
    "success": false,
    "message": "Invalid token"
}

Right away you can tell that in most situations where I'm returning a standard successful 200 code or a generic error 422 code, there's a lot less boilerplate to deal with but there's always the option to return a different status code if required.

May the Trait be with you!