Hi all,

I come from a background of developing apps in Symfony2, where instances returned from the service container (the Symfony2 equivalent of the Laravel 4 IoC container) are singletons by default. This is in contrast to Laravel 4, where each request for a class from the IoC container seems to return a new instance where this is not explicitly stated by the presence of either an App::bind or App::singleton call for the class.

Unfortunately, the way in which I build applications requires that the vast majority of instances requested from the IoC container are singletons rather than new instances. With my current understanding, it appears that in order to satisfy this requirement, I not only need to provide an App::singleton call for all singleton classes, but also tell Laravel how to create an instance of them:

App::singleton('App\Logic\AgencyImport\TabularArrayData\TableValidator.unparsedRow', function($app)
{
    return new \App\Logic\AgencyImport\TabularArrayData\TableValidator(
        App::make('App\Logic\AgencyImport\TabularArrayData\CsvBasedBuilder'),
        App::make('App\Logic\AgencyImport\TabularArrayData\UnparsedRowValidator')
    );
});

This is a real shame, because as things stand, the classes within my application have all been automatically bound together by the Automatic Resolution feature of the IoC container and my configuration is therefore very slim as a result. It looks like I'm going to need to create a code block along the above lines for most classes within my application in order to satisfy my need for singleton instances.

Can anybody offer any suggestions to meet my need for singleton instances within having to add large volumes of code to my IoC configuration? Ideally, this would involve changing the default behaviour to create singletons rather than new instances, but I'd also be interested to find out if Laravel offers a way to specify a given class as an IoC singleton without having to tell Laravel how to create that singleton instance.

Thanks,

Jon