Laravel: Conditional Relationship Counts on API Resources

You may conditionally include the count of a relationship in your resource response by using the whenCounted method. By doing so, the attribute is not included if the relationships' count is missing.

    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'name' => $this->name,
            'email' => $this->email,
            'posts_count' => $this->whenCounted('posts'),
            'created_at' => $this->created_at,
            'updated_at' => $this->updated_at,
        ];
    }