How To Clear Laravel Cache

Efficiency is the backbone of any successful application, and Laravel, one of the most popular PHP frameworks, understands this principle well. In its pursuit of enhancing performance, Laravel uses caches as a strategic tool. These caches serve as repositories for crucial data elements within your application, ranging from views and routes to events and beyond. 

In this Laravel Tips post, we are going to see how to clear each type of cache.

Clear Application Cache

To clear application cache, you can use the following artisan command:

php artisan config:clear

To clear a certain application cache entry, use the following command:

php artisan cache:forget [cache-key]

 Replace [cache-key] with the key of the cache entry you want to remove. 

You can also remove "stale" cache tags (works only with Redis cache) using the following command:

php artisan cache:prune-stale-tags

Clear Config Cache

To clear the Laravel config cache, use this command:

php artisan config:clear

After clearing the config cache, you might want to rebuild it using this command:

php artisan config:cache

Clear Route Cache

To clear the route cache, use the following command:

php artisan route:clear

Afterwards, you might want to run the following command to re-cache the routes:

php artisan route:cache

Clear View Cache

Laravel compiles the views and caches them for faster rendering. To clear view cache:

php artisan view:clear

To rebuild the view cache:

php artisan view:cache

Clear Event Cache

Laravel caches discovered events and listeners. To clear that cache:

php artisan event:clear

After clearning event cache you might want to rebuild it using:

php artisan event:cache

Clear Cache Programmatically (using code)

Laravel offers a cache API that allows you to clear the application cache using PHP code in case you want to do that. 

To clear a certain cache entry (with key):

Cache::forget('key');

// or 

cache()->forget('key');

To clear all cache:

Cache::flush();

// or 

cache()->flush();

Bonus: Optimize

Laravel comes with a new command which caches routes, configs, views and events. So you might rung that command after clearing any of those caches in order to rebuild caches and optimize your application:

php artisan optimize