Adding a paths to Laravel 4.1 paths.php - laravel-4

Question

Laravel 4.1 has a file paths.php and it has some paths: app, public, base and storage.
I wish to add another path so what I did:
I wrote this in paths.php
'upload' => __DIR__.'/../some/path/uploads',
Then I copied and pasted and edited this in helpers.php
if ( ! function_exists('upload_path'))
{
function upload_path($path = '')
{
return app()->make('path.upload').($path ? '/'.$path : $;
}
}
But after a few days it disappeared!
I am wondering if I did it wrong.

Answer 1

Never edit files in the vendor directory, it and its contents is entirely managed by Composer, and its contents will be overwritten when doing composer update.
If you want to add your own custom functions, autoload them in your composer.json using the "files" autoload rule.
"autoload": {
"files": ["app/helpers.php"]
}

Answer 2

The "Best" way I found to handle this were the included configuration folders.
Inside root/app/config/ you can add a host specific folder (there is one called local by default).
You can add someFolderName and then inside root/bootstrap/start.php update this array:
$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(
'local' => array('outLocalHostsName'),
'someFolderName' => array('SomeOtherMachinesHostname'),
));
Now go back to the folder and create an app.php file inside it (remember root/app/config/someFolderName/app.php) and add some value in it like so:
'someKeyNameHere' => 'some path string here'
Now you can access it anywhere using:
Config::get('app.someKeyNameHere')
This seems to work great for me.