Introduction Service providers are the central place of all Lumen application bootstrapping. Your own application, as well as all of Lumen's core services are bootstrapped via service providers. But, what do we mean by "bootstrapped"? In general, we mean registering things, including registering service container bindings and event listeners. Service providers are the central place to configure your application. If you open the bootstrap/app.php file included with Lumen, you will see a call to $app->register(). You may add additional calls to this method to register additional service providers. In this overview you will learn how to write your own service providers and register them with your Lumen application. Basic Provider Example All service providers extend the Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider class. This abstract class requires that you define at least one method on your provider: register. The Register Method Now, let's take a look at a basic service provider: ``` <?php namespace App\Providers; use Riak\Connection; use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider; class RiakServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider { /** * Register bindings in the container. * * @return void */ public function register() { $this->app->singleton('Riak\Contracts\Connection', function($app) { return new Connection($app['config']['riak']); }); } } ``` This service provider only defines a register method, and uses that method to define an implementation of Riak\Contracts\Connection in the service container. If you don't understand how the service container works, don't worry, we'll cover that soon. This class is namespaced under App\Providers since that is the default location for service providers in Laravel. However, you are free to change this as you wish. Your service providers may be placed anywhere that Composer can autoload them. Registering Providers All service providers are registered in the bootstrap/app.php bootstrap file. This file contains a sample call to ``` $app->register(). ``` To register your provider, simply add another call to this method: ``` $app->register('App\Providers\YourServiceProvider'); ```