[FIXED] How to deal with Class not found with composer

Issue

I installed composer and laravel and installed some packages
all work fine, but now I created my own class under the folder services
I gave it name space of Services like that:

namespace Services;

And the class name is UploadToImgurService

I run the composer command:

 composer dump-autoload

And in my controller I wrote:

 use Services\UploadToImgurService;

But I get this error:

 Class 'Services\UploadToImgurService' not found

What did I did wrong? Is there anything else that I should do with composer for autoloading the service class?

EDIT I found a solution
I edited y composer.json file and added to psr-4 the line

     "Services\\" : "app/services"

But why It didn't workt before? The line :

 "App\\": "app/",

was there, maybe it loaded the class but under the app namespace?

Solution

Your idea is right, but let me try to explain how the psr-4 autoloading works.

You can define root namespaces in your composer.json file and map it to any project directory. Inside the defined directories, your classes should get the root namespace. The namespace segments after the root are build by your sub directory structure and the class name is equal to the file name (PSR-4 Autoloading).

E.g "MyNamespace\\WithSubNamespace\\": "cool/project"

cool/project/MyClass.php -> MyNamespace\WithSubNamespace\MyClass

cool/project/SubDirectory/AnotherClass.php -> MyNamespace\WithSubNamespace\SubDirectory\AnotherClass

In Laravel, the app directory is mapped to the App namespace as default. Optionally, you can change the root namespace with the command php artisan app:name [NewRootNamespaceName], but the autoloader only finds classes inside the app directory. If you create a new directory outside of "app", you have to add the directory to your psr-4 namespace mapping in the composer.json file.

In your example, you define a new root namespace in the existing app directory, so your issue was that the root namespace was unknown and you solved it by adding the line in your composer.json. This is possible, because psr-4 provides a huge flexibility. But personally, i would not recommend to use different root namespaces in the same project.

I hope i could help and maybe this is also interesting for you: composer.json PSR-4.

Answered By - T Schi