Proposal: Attribute-Based Event Subscription

[ahmedsayedabdelsalam]

Proposal: Attribute-Based Event Subscription in Laravel

Motivation

Laravel currently supports two main ways to handle events:

1. EventServiceProvider::$listen

   • Great for simple cases, but requires a dedicated listener class for each event.

2. Subscriber classes with subscribe()

   • Useful for grouping multiple event listeners in one class.
   • But requires manual event → method mapping, introducing boilerplate and repetition.

Example today:

class UserEventSubscriber
{
    public function handleUserLogin(Login $event): void {}
    public function handleUserLogout(Logout $event): void {}

    public function subscribe(Dispatcher $events): void
    {
        $events->listen(Login::class, [self::class, 'handleUserLogin']);
        $events->listen(Logout::class, [self::class, 'handleUserLogout']);
    }
}

Proposal: Attribute-Based Subscription

Introduce a #[Subscribe] attribute that can be applied directly to methods in subscriber classes.

class UserEventSubscriber
{
    #[Subscribe(Login::class)]
    public function onLogin(Login $event): void {}

    #[Subscribe(Logout::class)]
    public function onLogout(Logout $event): void {}
}

Benefits

Less boilerplate → no need for subscribe() methods.
Cleaner intent → event handlers are self-documented at the method level.