Laravel's File facade (for local disk paths) and the Storage facade (for the abstracted filesystem, covered elsewhere on this site) both wrap plain PHP file functions with a slightly more convenient API for reading, replacing, and appending content.
Reading a file's full contents
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;
$content = File::get(storage_path('app/notes.txt'));File::get() throws a FileNotFoundException if the path doesn't exist — checking File::exists() first, or wrapping the call in a try/catch, avoids an unhandled exception when the file's presence isn't already guaranteed.
Creating a file, or completely replacing its contents
File::put(storage_path('app/notes.txt'), 'This is the new content.');File::put() creates the file if it doesn't exist, or completely overwrites its existing contents if it does — this is a genuinely destructive operation for an existing file, replacing everything previously there rather than adding to it.
Appending to an existing file, without overwriting it
File::append(storage_path('app/log.txt'), "New log entry: {$message}\n");File::append() is the genuinely different operation from put() despite the similarly short method name — it adds the given content to the end of whatever's already in the file, leaving the existing content untouched, correct for a running log rather than a value meant to be replaced each time.
Prepending content to the beginning of a file
$existing = File::get(storage_path('app/notes.txt'));
File::put(storage_path('app/notes.txt'), "New first line\n".$existing);There's no dedicated File::prepend() method — prepending requires manually reading the existing content first, then writing the new content followed by the original, since inserting at the very beginning of a file isn't a native filesystem-level operation the way appending to the end is.
Checking if a file exists before operating on it
if (File::exists(storage_path('app/notes.txt'))) {
$content = File::get(storage_path('app/notes.txt'));
}Deleting a file
File::delete(storage_path('app/notes.txt'));A practical use case: a simple custom log file, separate from Laravel's own logging
function logToCustomFile(string $message): void
{
$timestamp = now()->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
File::append(storage_path('logs/custom-events.log'), "[{$timestamp}] {$message}\n");
}For most application logging, Laravel's own Log facade (with its channel configuration, log rotation, and severity levels) is the better-suited tool — a raw File::append() loop like this is occasionally useful for a genuinely separate, simple output stream that doesn't need the full logging system's structure.
Why File:: operates on local paths, unlike Storage::
File:: methods take a literal filesystem path (like storage_path() or base_path()) and only ever work with the local disk directly — Storage::, by contrast, works through Laravel's filesystem abstraction layer, which can transparently target local disk, S3, or another cloud provider depending on configuration; File:: is the right choice specifically when the operation is known to always be local and doesn't need that portability.