Laravel 5 Eloquent appending relationships to JSON on multiple levels

If somebody is still interested in a solution for this: Laravel 5.5 introduced Api Resources which is a great way to organize the api responses. Just don’t include any relationships on your model and append them on the resource.

namespace App\Http\Resources;

use Illuminate\Http\Resources\Json\Resource;

class UserResource extends Resource
{
    public function toArray($request)
    {
        return [
            'id' => $this->id,
            'name' => $this->name,
            'email' => $this->email,
            'created_at' => $this->created_at,
            'updated_at' => $this->updated_at,
            'roles'=> $this->roles

        ];
    }
}