Extending Waterhole#

Waterhole is highly extensible, making it possible to add new features tailored to your community.

Waterhole is a Laravel package, meaning right off the bat you can add your own routes, views, middleware, container bindings, database migrations, console commands, and more, in the standard Laravel way.

But there are also plenty of opportunities to extend Waterhole itself. This section of the documentation covers those.

Service Providers#

In Laravel, all of the application bootstrapping – the registration of bindings, event listeners, middleware, routes – takes place in service providers. This is also the place where you can put code to extend Waterhole.

If you're building customizations specific to your community, then you can add code to your project's service providers, found in app/Providers.

If, on the other hand, you want to reuse, distribute, or sell your features, you can make an extension. The premise is the same though – the starting point is your extension's service providers.

Extenders#

The main mechanism by which you'll hook into Waterhole is with extenders. These are static classes that provide methods to extend Waterhole in some way. You can see all of the extenders that are available under the Waterhole\Extend namespace.

As a quick example, open up app/Providers/WaterholeServiceProvider.php and add the following code to the extend method:

use Illuminate\View\Component;
use Waterhole\Extend;

public function extend()
{
    Extend\LayoutBefore::add(
        new class extends Component {
            public function render()
            {
                return 'Hello, world!';
            }
        }
    );
}

Now reload your forum to see your first customization!

What did we just do? We used the LayoutBefore extender to inject a custom component into the Waterhole layout. There are dozens more extenders like this covering all parts of Waterhole's views and functionality, ready for you to hook into.

Warning: To avoid strange behavior when using Laravel Octane, extenders should always be called in the extend method of a service provider, and should never be guarded by a request-specific condition. For example, don't do this:

if (Auth::check()) {
    Extend\Header::add('foo', 'bar');
}

Instead, pass a closure to the extender and put the condition inside:

Extend\Header::add('foo', fn() => Auth::check() ? 'bar' : null);

Next Steps#

Using extenders in service providers, you can achieve a whole range of things within Waterhole:

• Add Actions to the context menus of posts, comments, and other objects.
• Add pages and widgets to the Control Panel.
• Inject frontend Assets, like scripts and stylesheets.
• Hook into Waterhole's frontend.
• Run Database migrations and queries.
• Add custom ways to sort the post and comment lists using Filters.
• Add new text Formatting syntax.
• Make your features localizable.
• Add Authentication providers.
• Create new types of Notifications to send to users.
• Add your own Routes to the application.