Eloquent's missing "array" driver.

Sometimes you want to use Eloquent, but without dealing with a database.

Originally, this package was only available to my sponsors on GitHub Sponsors until I reached 75 sponsors.

Now that we've reached the goal, the package is fully open source.

Enjoy, and thanks for the support! ❤️

Learn more about Sponsorware at github.com/sponsorware/docs 💰.

composer require calebporzio/sushi

Using this package consists of two steps:

1. Add the Sushi trait to a model.
2. Add a $rows property to the model.

That's it.

class State extends Model
{
    use \Sushi\Sushi;

    protected $rows = [
        [
            'abbr' => 'NY',
            'name' => 'New York',
        ],
        [
            'abbr' => 'CA',
            'name' => 'California',
        ],
    ];
}

Now, you can use this model anywhere you like, and it will behave as if you created a table with the rows you provided.

$stateName = State::whereAbbr('NY')->first()->name;

This is really useful for "Fixture" data, like states, countries, zip codes, user_roles, sites_settings, etc...

Let's say you created a Role model, based on an array using Sushi, that looked like this:

class Role extends Model
{
    use \Sushi\Sushi;

    protected $rows = [
        ['id' => 1, 'label' => 'admin'],
        ['id' => 2, 'label' => 'manager'],
        ['id' => 3, 'label' => 'user'],
    ];
}

You can add a relationship to another standard model, just like you normally would:

class User extends Model
{
    ...

    public function role()
    {
        return $this->belongsTo(Role::class);
    }
}

Assuming the users table has a role_id column, you can do things like this:

// Grab a User.
$user = User::first();
// Grab a Role.
$role = Role::whereLabel('admin')->first();

// Associate them.
$user->role()->associate($role);

// Access like normal.
$user->role;

// Eager load.
$user->load('role');
User::with('role')->first();

Note: There is one caveat when dealing with Sushi model relationships. The whereHas method will NOT work. This is because the two models are spread across two separate databases.

If Sushi's schema auto-detection system doesn't meet your specific requirements for the supplied row data, you can customize them with the $schema property or the getSchema() method.

class Products extends Model
{
    use \Sushi\Sushi;

    protected $rows = [
        ['name' => 'Lawn Mower', 'price' => '226.99'],
        ['name' => 'Leaf Blower', 'price' => '134.99'],
        ['name' => 'Rake', 'price' => '9.99'],
    ];

    protected $schema = [
        'price' => 'float',
    ];
}

Under the hood, this package creates and caches a SQLite database JUST for this model. It creates a table and populates the rows. If, for whatever reason, it can't cache a .sqlite file, it will default to using an in-memory sqlite database.

You can optionally opt out of using the protected $rows property, and directly implement your own getRows() method.

This will allow you to determine the rows for the model at runtime. You can even generate the model's rows from an external source like a third-party API.

Note: If you choose to use your own ->getRows() method, the rows will NOT be cached between requests.

class Role extends Model
{
    use \Sushi\Sushi;

    public function getRows()
    {
        return [
            ['id' => 1, 'label' => 'admin'],
            ['id' => 2, 'label' => 'manager'],
            ['id' => 3, 'label' => 'user'],
        ];
    }
}