At the very end of Views section of docs there's a mention of creators, maybe they will work as you want:

View creators work almost exactly like view composers; however, they are fired immediately when the view is instantiated. To register a view creator, use the creator method:

View::creator('profile', 'App\Http\ViewCreators\ProfileCreator');

Spot on, thanks Xum!

Looking at the source code, the two functions set up events, 'creating:' and 'composing:'

$composers[] = $this->addViewEvent($view, $callback, 'composing: ', $priority);

I guess this code is run as part of the view lifecycle.

It's a shame the naming is not particularly intuitive - creator() sounds like it would do something completely different, such as create a view. This is strange, as I know one of Tylor Otwell's aims is to provide readable / obvious method names.

It seems to be this would be more consistently implemented (as per controller filters) as View::beforeFilter() and View::afterFilter() rather than View::create() and View::compose().

Anyway, thanks for the pointer.