## Counter Cache

Brings the ruby concept of "counter caching" to [Laravel](http://laravel.com/docs).

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## Introduction
One thing we at [Nodes](http://nodesagency.com) have been missing in [Laravel](http://laravel.com/docs) is the concept of "counter caching".

Laravel comes "out of the box" with the [increment](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates)/[decrement](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates) methods on it's [Eloquent](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/eloquent) models. But you'll need to manually execute these methods everytime, you've saved/delete stuff with your model.

Since the [increment](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates)/[decrement](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates) methods always +1/-1, you can't 100% rely on these as cached value.
What if you forgot to execute the decrement method when you deleted a row. Or what if someone deleted a row directly from the database, then your count would be "out of sync".

Therefore we've created this package which brings "counter caching" to [Laravel](http://laravel.com/docs).

The difference between this package and Laravel's [increment](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates)/[decrement](http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#updates) is that our package actually generates and fires a SQL count statement, that counts the entries and updates the desired column with the result.

This way you're always 100% sure that the value in your "counter cache" column is correct.

## Installation

To install this package you will need:

* Laravel 5.1+
* PHP 5.5.9+

You must then modify your `composer.json` file and run `composer update` to include the latest version of the package in your project.

```
"require": {
    "nodes/counter-cache": "^0.1"
}
```

Or you can run the composer require command from your terminal.

```
composer require nodes/counter-cache
```


## Usage

To do.

## Developers / Maintainers

This package is developed and maintained by the PHP team at [Nodes Agency](http://nodesagency.com)

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### License

This package is open-sourced software licensed under the [MIT license](http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)