What is a Service Provider?

 Difficulty: Intermediate → Advanced

Service providers are central places for bootstrapping application services.

They can register bindings and perform initialization.

Conceptually:

Application starts
       ↓
Service providers load
       ↓
Services registered
       ↓
Application bootstrapped

A service provider can register an interface implementation:

$this->app->bind(
    PaymentGateway::class,
    StripePaymentGateway::class
);

Then application code can depend on:

PaymentGateway

rather than directly depending on:

StripePaymentGateway

This helps maintain loose coupling.

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The important interview progression

For this 1000-question bank, we'll deliberately progress from:

PHP
 ↓
Laravel Fundamentals
 ↓
Routing
 ↓
Controllers
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Blade
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Validation
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MySQL
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Eloquent
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Relationships
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APIs
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Authentication
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OAuth
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Social Login
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AJAX/jQuery
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Services
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Repositories
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Events
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Queues
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Redis
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Testing
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