Looking out why your Laravel requests are showing the error controller does not exist?

Mostly, this can be due to improper setup of controllers or typos in the code.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to fix Laravel errors, as a part of our Infrastructure Management Services.

Today lets see how our Support Engineers fix this controller error in Laravel.

What is a controller in Laravel?

Before getting into controller let’s have a look at Laravel. Laravel is a PHP based web application framework. And the controller is among its important features.

Usually, request handling logics, defined as Closures are present in route files. But in Laravel, we can organize this into Controllers.

Basically, Controllers group associated request handling logic into a single class. The default directory for controllers is app/Http/Controllers.

When does Laravel show error controller does not exist?

To add a new controller, first, we add the controller in its directory and then add its route. Then to autoload this, users run the command,

php artisan dump-autoload

But sometimes this situation ends up in Controller error. And the error message shows up as,

This error can occur due to improper controllers setup. So the reason for each user varies. Let’s see how our Support Engineers troubleshoot and fix this error.

How we fix this Laravel controller error?

For fixing this error, our Support Engineers check the corresponding files. That is the controller files and routes files. And check if their setup misses anything. Let’s see a few instances where we fixed this error.

Wrong setup of Controllers

Recently one of our customers approached us with this error. When our Support Engineers checked, we could easily fix this error.

The customer did not add the autoload classmap to the composer.json file. Hence we added it and executed the composer dumpload autoload command.

If the controllers have folders in it, we add it to the composer.json file. We can do this in another way. Here we add the following code to the app/start/global.php file. And the code appears as,

ClassLoader::addDirectories(array(
app_path().'/controllers/admin',
));

Later, autoloading worked without errors.

Code error in the Controller file

In another case, a customer had improper code in the LoginController.php file. In this case, our Support Engineers corrected his code and properly mapped it into the routes.php file.

Improper setup of routes

For another customer, the error was with the file routes.php. The customer had an incorrect entry in these files regarding the HomeController. Here our Support Engineers corrected it. And the entry in the routes.php file appears as,

Route::get('/', 'App\Http\Controllers\HomeController@index');

And editing this fixed the error.

[Need assistance in fixing Laravel errors? – We can help you.]

Conclusion

In short, Laravel controller does not exist error shows up due to improper set up of controllers. In today’s writeup, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.