Laravel create a json file and append content to it.

In this post, I would like to show you creating a JSON file and appending content to it whenever somebody submits a form. For this tutorial, I am gonna use Laravel 5.6 version.

Let’s create a brand new Laravel project via Composer Create-Project command. lets issue following command from your terminal:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel jsonAppendDemo

It will create a directory called jsonAppendDemo and download all the Laravel project files and its dependencies.

After completing setup process, create a view file called contact_form.blade.php in resources/views directory with following HTML.

    {{ csrf_field() }}

    

        Name
        
    

    

        Email
        
    

    

        Subject
        
    

    

        Message
        
    

    

        
     

Create a controller called ContactController.php with below command:

$ php artisan make:controller ContactController

After creating controller lets define following methods, index is to show the contact form and store method is to handle the submitted data.

    function index() {
      return view('contact_form');
    }

    function store(Request $request) {

        try {
            // my data storage location is project_root/storage/app/data.json file.
            $contactInfo = Storage::disk('local')->exists('data.json') ? json_decode(Storage::disk('local')->get('data.json')) : [];
        
            $inputData = $request->only(['name', 'email', 'message','subject']);
           
            $inputData['datetime_submitted'] = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

            array_push($contactInfo,$inputData);
    
            Storage::disk('local')->put('data.json', json_encode($contactInfo));

            return $inputData;

        } catch(Exception $e) {

            return ['error' => true, 'message' => $e->getMessage()];

        }
    }

All set lets define routes to access the form and to process the submitted data in your web.php route file.

Route::get('/', 'ContactController@index');
Route::post('/contact/store', 'ContactController@store');

Now start the php server with below command

$ php artisan serve

Once it is started, if you visiting http://localhost:8000, you should see the following page in your browser

Once you submit the form data will be stored in the project_root/storage/app/data.json file.
Here is my data.json file.

[{"name":null,"email":null,"message":null,"datetime_submitted":"2018-05-02 01:36:30"},{"name":"Arjun","email":"[email protected]","message":"Hey there!","datetime_submitted":"2018-05-02 01:37:10"}]