Clean Up Your Laravel Services with Pipelines

As your Laravel app grows, it’s easy for service classes to become bloated and hard to maintain. That’s where service pipelines come in. A pipeline lets you break a process into a sequence of smaller, focused classes that handle just one step. You “pipe” a model, DTO, or array through them—each one makes a change and passes it on.

Think of it like middleware, but for business logic.

A Basic Example

Let’s say you’re registering a new user and want to:

• Validate the data
• Create the user
• Assign a default role
• Send a welcome email

Instead of putting all that into one service, you can do this:

use Illuminate\Pipeline\Pipeline;

$data = [...]; // validated input

$user = app(Pipeline::class)
    ->send($data)
    ->through([
        \App\Pipelines\CreateUser::class,
        \App\Pipelines\AssignDefaultRole::class,
        \App\Pipelines\SendWelcomeEmail::class,
    ])
    ->thenReturn();

Each class would look like this:

class CreateUser
{
    public function handle(array $data, Closure $next)
    {
        $data['user'] = User::create($data);
        return $next($data);
    }
}

Why Use Pipelines?

• Cleaner Code: Each step does one thing well. Easier to test and reason about.
• Reusable Steps: You can re-use pipes in different service contexts.
• Extensible: Need to add logging, auditing, or feature flags? Just drop in another class.
• Composable: Great when you want to dynamically build a pipeline, e.g. based on config or user input.

When to Reach for Pipelines

• Complex business logic that involves multiple steps
• Code that’s hard to test because everything is tightly coupled
• You’re already using services and want better structure
• Anywhere you'd otherwise write a large procedural service class

If you’re using the TALL stack, pipelines work beautifully alongside Livewire actions or controller methods, keeping your components slim and focused.