Laravel is a popular PHP framework for web development. This framework provides an inbuilt authentication feature. During the development of an application, you may face the error “Target class [Api\UserController] does not exist in laravel“. Here are some ways to solve this error.

How Does The Error “Target class [Api\UserController] does not exist in laravel 8” Occur?

This can be your UserController.php:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers\Api;

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller
{
public function login(Request $request)
{
print_r('login');
}
}

And this can be your route api.php: 

Route::get('login', 'Api\UserController@login');

But you may encounter this problem:

Target class [Api\UserController] does not exist.

What causes error?

In this error situation, you need to know that, with Laravel version 8, Namespace prefixes are not applied to your route groups that your routes are loaded into. This is also the main cause of this error.

How to fix it?

Here are some solution for you.

Option 1: Include the controller namespace in the routes section.

This is the official message from Laravel 8 about routes. The RouteServiceProvider had a $namespace property in previous Laravel releases. The value of this property will be prefixed to controller route definitions as well as calls to the action helper / URL::action method by default. This property defaults to null in Laravel 8.x. This means that Laravel will not perform any auto namespace prefixing.

When referring to the Controllers in the routes without utilizing the namespace prefixing, we must utilize Fully Qualified Class Name. In Laravel 8, you simply include the controller namespace as shown below.

use App\Http\Controllers\UserController;
 Route::get('/login', [UserController::class, 'login']);

Option 2: Utilize a namespace similar to this.

Simply set the full path in the route to something similar to this.

Route::get('/login', 'App\Http\Controllers\UserController@login');

Option 3: In RouteServiceProvider.php, delete the comment

To begin with, go to app\Providers\RouteServiceProvider.php and access RouteServiceProvider.php.

Delete the line’s comment below now.

protected $namespace = 'App\\Http\\Controllers';

Then update boot by:

public function boot()
{
$this->configureRateLimiting();

$this->routes(function () {
Route::middleware('web')
->namespace($this->namespace)
->group(base_path('routes/web.php'));

Route::prefix('api')
->middleware('api')
->namespace($this->namespace)
->group(base_path('routes/api.php'));
});
}

Option 4

If you’re using Laravel 8, use this command line to quickly handle the above error:

use App\Http\Controllers\UserController;

Route::get('/user', [UserController::class, 'index']);

Conclusion

We hope our blog post on solving the error “Target class [Api\UserController] does not exist in laravel 8” was useful. With this information, you should be able to handle this annoyance and a slew of other concerns when you design your application.

Please leave a comment if you want to learn more about the topic or if you have any questions or ideas to share. Thank you for taking the time to read this!