Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site showing you how to conditionally load providers in your Laravel-based application with some additional code in the AppServiceProvider.

Since Laravel 5 flattened a lot of the environment-specific structures, much of the configuration that was once stored in different config directories for each environment has now moved into .env files. But one that can't just live in .env is the environment-dependent loading of service providers.

He starts with a look at the normal service provider loading process, using the application configuration and adding them to the "providers" list. This loads them every time a request is made, even if they're not needed. His solution adds some code to the "register" method in the AppServiceProvider class to check the environment (like "production" versus "dev") and loads different providers based on the result.