IMO it's absolutely valid to transition to an OOP approach step by step.
To your question:
Yes, you can use Eloquent standalone.
Here is the packagist site: https://packagist.org/packages/illuminate/database
Add "illuminate/database": "5.0.*@dev" to your composer.json and run composer update.
Now you'll need to bootstrap Eloquent. (https://github.com/illuminate/database)
The following is copied from the repo's readme:
Usage Instructions
First, create a new "Capsule" manager instance. Capsule aims to make configuring the library for usage outside of the Laravel framework as easy as possible.
use Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager as Capsule;
$capsule = new Capsule;
$capsule->addConnection([
'driver' => 'mysql',
'host' => 'localhost',
'database' => 'database',
'username' => 'root',
'password' => 'password',
'charset' => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
'prefix' => '',
]);
// Set the event dispatcher used by Eloquent models... (optional)
use Illuminate\Events\Dispatcher;
use Illuminate\Container\Container;
$capsule->setEventDispatcher(new Dispatcher(new Container));
// Set the cache manager instance used by connections... (optional)
$capsule->setCacheManager(...);
// Make this Capsule instance available globally via static methods... (optional)
$capsule->setAsGlobal();
// Setup the Eloquent ORM... (optional; unless you've used setEventDispatcher())
$capsule->bootEloquent();
Once the Capsule instance has been registered. You may use it like so:
Using The Query Builder
$users = Capsule::table('users')->where('votes', '>', 100)->get();
Other core methods may be accessed directly from the Capsule in the same manner as from the DB facade:
$results = Capsule::select('select * from users where id = ?', array(1));
Using The Schema Builder
Capsule::schema()->create('users', function($table)
{
$table->increments('id');
$table->string('email')->unique();
$table->timestamps();
});
Using The Eloquent ORM
class User extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model {}
$users = User::where('votes', '>', 1)->get();
For further documentation on using the various database facilities this library provides, consult the Laravel framework documentation.
