Laravel 5.1 pagination groupby links rendering

I am on Laravel Framework version 5.1.45 (LTS).

One club can have many events. I am trying to list all the events, group them by year and show one page per year.

According to my Laravel version documentation "Currently, pagination operations that use a groupBy statement cannot be executed efficiently by Laravel. If you need to use a groupBy with a paginated result set, it is recommended that you query the database and create a paginator manually."

Here is my attempt to create the paginator manually and it seems to do the job:

public function index()
{
            $page = Paginator::resolveCurrentPage() - 1;
            $perPage = 1;
            $events = new Paginator(Event::orderBy('date', 'desc')->groupBy(DB::raw('YEAR(date)'))->skip(($page - 1) * $perPage)->take($perPage + 1)->get(), $perPage, $page);
            $events->setPath(['events/events']);
            return view('events.index', ['events' => $events]);
}

And here is how I try to display the links at the bottom of the page.

{!! $events->render() !!}

If I remove the render bit, the page is displayed, albeit with no links. I can even go to the next page (year 2016) adding manually ?page=2 at the end of the url in my browser.

But if I leave the render bit in the index page, I get ErrorException in AbstractPaginator.php line 130: Array to string conversion.

What am I doing wrong?

via Chebli Mohamed