README

DDD entity scaffolding and base classes for Laravel applications.

Aristotle generates typed, immutable entity classes from your Eloquent models by reading the database schema and respecting your model's $casts. Entities implement Arrayable, ArrayAccess, and IteratorAggregate out of the box.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+
• Laravel 11, 12, or 13

Installation

composer require splitstack/aristotle

The service provider is auto-discovered. Optionally publish the config and/or stub:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=aristotle-config
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=aristotle-stubs

Generating an entity

php artisan make:entity

The command will prompt you to choose a model and a domain. You can also pass everything as options:

php artisan make:entity User --model=User --domain=Auth

Options

The command reads the model's table columns and $casts, then writes a typed entity class. For example, given a users table with id, name, email, and email_verified_at columns, the output is:

// app/Domain/Auth/Entities/UserEntity.php

namespace App\Domain\Auth\Entities;

use Carbon\CarbonInterface;
use Splitstack\Aristotle\BaseEntity;

final class UserEntity extends BaseEntity
{
    public function __construct(
        public ?int $id = null,
        public string $name,
        public string $email,
        public ?CarbonInterface $email_verified_at = null,
    ) {}
}

Using an entity

$user = UserEntity::fromArray($model->toArray());

$user->name;          // typed access
$user['email'];       // ArrayAccess
foreach ($user as $key => $value) { ... }   // iterable
$user->toArray();     // back to array

Entities are immutable — attempting to set or unset a property via array access throws a BadMethodCallException.

Configuration

// config/aristotle.php

return [
    // Root namespace for all domains
    'namespace' => 'App\\Domain',

    // Sub-folder appended after the domain name
    // e.g. "Entities" → App\Domain\Auth\Entities
    // Set to null or '' to place entities directly under the domain
    'entities_folder' => 'Entities',

    // Optional suffix appended to generated class names
    // e.g. "Entity" → UserEntity
    'entity_suffix' => env('ARISTOTLE_ENTITY_SUFFIX', 'Entity'),
];

Type resolution

Column types and Eloquent casts are mapped to PHP types automatically:

Nullable columns and auto-increment columns are generated as nullable (?Type = null).

Extending the stub

After publishing the stub (vendor:publish --tag=aristotle-stubs), edit stubs/entity.stub. The available placeholders are {{ namespace }}, {{ imports }}, {{ class }}, and {{ properties }}.

License

MIT