Laravel Spatial

This is a Laravel package to work with geospatial data types and functions.

It supports only MySQL Spatial Data Types and Functions, other RDBMS is on the roadmap.

Laravel Compatibility

Version	Supported Laravel Versions
2.x	^11.0
1.x	^8.0, ^9.0, ^10.0

Supported data types:

• Point

Available Scopes:

• withinDistanceTo($column, $coordinates, $distance)
• selectDistanceTo($column, $coordinates)
• orderByDistanceTo($column, $coordinates, 'asc')

---

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require tarfin-labs/laravel-spatial

Usage

Generate a new model with a migration file:

php artisan make:model Address --migration

1- Migrations:

Code Differences Based on Laravel Version

Some code snippets in the project differ before and after Laravel 11 version. Below are the steps to specify these differences:

For Laravel 8, 9, and 10 Versions

To add a spatial data field, you need to extend the migration from TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Migrations\SpatialMigration.

It is a simple abstract class that adds point spatial data type to Doctrine mapped types in the constructor.

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Migrations\SpatialMigration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends SpatialMigration {

    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('addresses', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->point('location');
        })
    }
}

The migration above creates an addresses table with a location spatial column.

Spatial columns with no SRID attribute are not SRID-restricted and accept values with any SRID. However, the optimizer cannot use SPATIAL indexes on them until the column definition is modified to include an SRID attribute, which may require that the column contents first be modified so that all values have the same SRID.

So you should give an SRID attribute to use spatial indexes in the migrations and indexed columns must be NOT NULL:

Schema::create('addresses', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->point(column: 'location', srid: 4326);

    $table->spatialIndex('location');
})

For Laravel 11 and Above Versions

From Laravel 11 onwards, migrations are created as follows:

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends Migration {
    
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('addresses', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->geography('location', 'point');
        })
    }

}

In Laravel 11, the methods point, lineString, polygon, geometryCollection, multiPoint, multiLineString, and multiPolygon have been removed. Therefore, we are updating to use the geography method instead. The geography method sets the default SRID value to 4326.

Issue with adding a new location column with index to an existing table:

When adding a new location column with an index in Laravel, it can be troublesome if you have existing data. One common mistake is trying to set a default value for the new column using ->default(new Point(0, 0, 4326)). However, POINT columns cannot have a default value, which can cause issues when trying to add an index to the column, as indexed columns cannot be nullable.

To solve this problem, it is recommended to perform a two-step migration like following:

For Laravel 8, 9, and 10 Versions

public function up()
{
    // Add the new location column as nullable
    Schema::table('table', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->point('location')->nullable();
    });

    // In the second go, set 0,0 values, make the column not null and finally add the spatial index
    Schema::table('table', function (Blueprint $table) {
        DB::statement("UPDATE `table` SET `location` = POINT(0,0);");

        DB::statement("ALTER TABLE `table` CHANGE `location` `location` POINT NOT NULL;");

        $table->spatialIndex('location');
    });
}

For Laravel 11 and Above Versions

public function up()
{
    // Add the new location column as nullable
    Schema::table('table', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->geography('location', 'point')->nullable();
    });

    // In the second go, set 0,0 values, make the column not null and finally add the spatial index
    Schema::table('table', function (Blueprint $table) {
        DB::statement("UPDATE `addresses` SET `location` = ST_GeomFromText('POINT(0 0)', 4326);");

        DB::statement("ALTER TABLE `table` CHANGE `location` `location` POINT NOT NULL;");

        $table->spatialIndex('location');
    });
}

---

2- Models:

Fill the $fillable, $casts arrays in the model:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Casts\LocationCast;
use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Traits\HasSpatial;

class Address extends Model {

    use HasSpatial;

    protected $fillable = [
        'id',
        'name',
        'address',
        'location',
    ];
    
    protected array $casts = [
        'location' => LocationCast::class
    ];

}

3- Spatial Data Types:

Point:

Point represents the coordinates of a location and contains latitude, longitude, and srid properties.

At this point, it is crucial to understand what SRID is. Each spatial instance has a spatial reference identifier (SRID). The SRID corresponds to a spatial reference system based on the specific ellipsoid used for either flat-earth mapping or round-earth mapping. A spatial column can contain objects with different SRIDs.

For details about SRID you can follow the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system

• Default value of latitude, longitude parameters is 0.0.
• Default value of srid parameter is 0.

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point;

$location = new Point(lat: 28.123456, lng: 39.123456, srid: 4326);

$location->getLat(); // 28.123456
$location->getLng(); // 39.123456
$location->getSrid(); // 4326

You can override the default SRID via the laravel-spatial config file. To do that, you should publish the config file using vendor:publish artisan command:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\LaravelSpatialServiceProvider"

After that, you can change the value of default_srid in config/laravel-spatial.php

return [
    'default_srid' => 4326,
];

---

Configuring WKT options

By default, this package uses the longitude latitude order for the coordinate values in the WKT format used by spatial functions. This is necessary for some versions of MySQL, which will interpret coordinate pairs as lat-long unless the axis-order option is explicitly set to long-lat.

However, MariaDB reads WKT values as long-lat by default, and its spatial functions like ST_GeomFromText and ST_DISTANCE do not accept an options parameter like their MySQL counterparts. This means that using the package with MariaDB will result in a Syntax error or access violation: 1582 Incorrect parameter count in the call to native function 'ST_GeomFromText' exception.

To address this issue, we have added a with_wkt_options parameter to the config file that can be used to override the default options. This property can be set to false to remove the options parameter entirely, which fixes the errors when using MariaDB.

return [
    'with_wkt_options' => true,
];

---

Bulk Operations

In order to insert or update several rows with spatial data in one query using the upsert() method in Laravel, the package requires a workaround solution to avoid the error Object of class TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point could not be converted to string.

The solution is to use the toGeomFromText() method to convert the Point object to a WKT string, and then use DB::raw() to create a raw query string.

Here's an example of how to use this workaround in your code:

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point;

$points = [
    ['external_id' => 5, 'location' => DB::raw((new Point(lat: 40.73, lng: -73.93))->toGeomFromText())],
    ['external_id' => 7, 'location' => DB::raw((new Point(lat: -37.81, lng: 144.96))->toGeomFromText())],
];

Property::upsert($points, ['external_id'], ['location']);

---

4- Scopes:

withinDistanceTo()

You can use the withinDistanceTo() scope to filter locations by given distance:

To filter addresses within the range of 10 km from the given coordinate:

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point;
use App\Models\Address;

Address::query()
       ->withinDistanceTo('location', new Point(lat: 25.45634, lng: 35.54331), 10000)
       ->get();

selectDistanceTo()

You can get the distance between two points by using selectDistanceTo() scope. The distance will be in meters:

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point;
use App\Models\Address;

Address::query()
       ->selectDistanceTo('location', new Point(lat: 25.45634, lng: 35.54331))
       ->get();

orderByDistanceTo()

You can order your models by distance to given coordinates:

use TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point;
use App\Models\Address;

// ASC
Address::query()
       ->orderByDistanceTo('location', new Point(lat: 25.45634, lng: 35.54331))
       ->get();

// DESC
Address::query()
       ->orderByDistanceTo('location', new Point(lat: 25.45634, lng: 35.54331), 'desc')
       ->get();

Get latitude and longitude of the location:

use App\Models\Address;

$address = Address::find(1);
$address->location; // TarfinLabs\LaravelSpatial\Types\Point

$address->location->getLat();
$address->location->getLng();

Create a new address with location:

use App\Models\Address;

Address::create([
    'name'      => 'Bag End',
    'address'   => '1 Bagshot Row, Hobbiton, Shire',
    'location'  => new Point(lat: 25.45634, lng: 35.54331),
]);

Usage in Resource:

To get an array representation of a location-casted field from a resource, you can return parent::toArray($request).

If you need to return a custom array from a resource, you can use the toArray() method of the Point object.

class LocationResource extends JsonResource
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'location' => $this->location->toArray(),
        ];
    }
}

Either way, you will get the following output for the location casted field:

{
    "lat": 25.45634,
    "lng": 35.54331,
    "srid": 4326
}

Testing

composer test

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email development@tarfin.com instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Turan Karatug
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.