ID-Anchored Slugs

ID-anchored slugs combine the slug with the model's primary key into a single route key (/posts/hello-world-5). The ID is what actually resolves the model, so the slug can change freely without ever breaking a link. When someone visits an old URL, a canonical redirect points them to the current one.

This is our take on the same problem Spatie solves with "Self-Healing URLs" — different name, same value.

Enabling

Set appendId: true on the #[Slugify] attribute. The HasSlug trait is required (the feature overrides the route-key methods, so attribute-only models cannot use it):

php

use Oliwol\Slugify\HasSlug;
use Oliwol\Slugify\Slugify;

#[Slugify(from: 'title', to: 'slug', appendId: true)]
class Post extends Model
{
    use HasSlug; // required for appendId
}

Or via the fluent SlugConfig API:

php

use Oliwol\Slugify\SlugConfig;

public function slugConfig(): SlugConfig
{
    return SlugConfig::create()
        ->from('title')
        ->to('slug')
        ->appendId();
}

How it works

getRouteKey() returns {slug}-{id} (e.g. hello-world-5), so route('posts.show', $post) generates the anchored URL automatically.
resolveRouteBindingQuery() extracts the trailing number as the primary key and resolves the model by ID — the slug part is ignored for resolution.
The slug.redirect middleware compares the slug in the URL with the current route key and issues a canonical redirect when they differ.

php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('/posts/{post}', fn (Post $post) => view('posts.show', compact('post')))
    ->middleware(['slug.redirect'])
    ->name('posts.show');

GET /posts/hello-world-5      → 200 OK
# title changed to "Updated Title":
GET /posts/hello-world-5      → 308 → /posts/updated-title-5

The redirect preserves the query string. Its status defaults to 308 (Permanent Redirect) and is configurable in config/slugify.php:

php

'id_anchored_redirect_status' => 308,

Clean slugs, no increment suffix

Because the primary key already makes every URL unique, the slug itself stays clean — no -2 uniqueness suffix is appended even for duplicate titles:

php

$a = Post::create(['title' => 'Same Title']); // slug: "same-title", URL: same-title-1
$b = Post::create(['title' => 'Same Title']); // slug: "same-title", URL: same-title-2

maxLength still applies to the slug part.

Slugs ending in a number

If the slug ends in a digit, the route key simply has two trailing numbers — the last one is always the ID, which keeps resolution unambiguous:

php

$post = Post::create(['title' => 'Hello World 2']); // id 7
$post->getRouteKey(); // "hello-world-2-7" → resolves to id 7