Building an Artisan command

First, we will build an Artisan command. This is my favorite feature of Laravel. It is a nice wrapper around the Symfony console, making it easy to make commands. Commands are a key solution to long-running background processes or to those commands which you need to maintain your site and more.

For example, many projects that I am working on use this for creating Oauth tokens, stub data for a complex data set, and more; it is also used to run code optimizations using tools such as php-cs-fixer.

Here, we will build a command to search for the latest comics of user favorites that we will use later for scheduled commands.

Getting ready

A fresh install of Laravel is fine. I am still working inside the context of the comic book app. Also, note that this will assume you have a user in UserTableSeeder, as I did in Chapter 5, Working with Data.

How to do it...

1. Make some seed data for the user to run the following:

   >php artisan make:seeder FavoritesSeeder
   

2. Then, add this file...