Laravel Facades

Throughout the Laravel documentation, you will see examples of code that interacts with Laravel's features via "facades". Facades provide a "static" interface to classes that are available in the application's service container. Laravel ships with many facades which provide access to almost all of Laravel's features.

Laravel facades serve as "static proxies" to underlying classes in the service container, providing the benefit of a terse, expressive syntax while maintaining more testability and flexibility than traditional static methods. It's perfectly fine if you don't totally understand how facades work under the hood - just go with the flow and continue learning about Laravel.

All of Laravel's facades are defined in the Illuminate\Support\Facades namespace. So, we can easily access a facade like so:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('/cache', function () {
    return Cache::get('key');
});

Throughout the Laravel documentation, many of the examples will use facades to demonstrate various features of the framework.