Motivation¶

Consider a situation where an add-on exposes a “Cart” service on the dependency container. Without separation, this service name could not be used by other add-ons without creating a collision.

Solution¶

Providers help keep these parts separate by automatically prefixing them. All providers are simply a wrapper around the same core dependency object, with a given prefix:

$prefix = 'myaddon';
$provider = new Provider($dependencies, $prefix);

When registering or accessing an element on a provider, the prefix is automatically enforced. So these two are equivalent:

$provider->register('service', $obj);
// ==
$dependencies->register('myaddon:service', $obj);

All providers are simply wrappers around the same core dependency object, so elements from other provider are available on all of them, using the correct prefix:

$provider->make('service'); // addon:service
$provider->make('addoff:service'); // addoff:service

Default Provider¶

The default provider is the one that exposes the “ee” prefix. This prefix is used for all the default services. The ee() function is an alias to the default provider’s make() method.