Generating Unique Slugs Elegantly

Using slugs in URLs is a great alternative to strictly using integers (ids), as it improves SEO by allowing you to get more context in the URL. However, generating them can be a pain. Here is a super simple method for generating slugs that you can adapt to your own needs.

private function getEventSlug($title)
{
    $slug = Str::slug($title);
    $slugCount = count( $this->event->whereRaw("slug REGEXP '^{$slug}(-[0-9]*)?$'")->get() );
    return ($slugCount > 0) ? "{$slug}-{$slugCount}" : $slug;
}

Easy! Here I am generating slugs for events; you’ll need to modify the code for your own purposes.

Explanation

We accept the title we want to slugify as a parameter and use Laravel’s string helper to convert it to a slug. From there we query our event model using the whereRaw() method and perform a regex expression to grab all the events with slugs matching the title, or matching the title with a number appended to the end. We count the results, and if there are matching slugs we append that number to the slug to make it unique.

A more general version of the method might look like this:

public function getSlug($title, $model)
{
    $slug = Str::slug($title);
    $slugCount = count( $model->whereRaw("slug REGEXP '^{$slug}(-[0-9]*)?$'")->get() );
    return ($slugCount > 0) ? "{$slug}-{$slugCount}" : $slug;
}

Enjoy! If you have any Laravel tricks of your own please post them in the comments below.

Note: This works with MySQL but likely won’t work with other RDBMSs; the concept should work but the regular expression implementation is likely different.