Vortex beam is a new type of structured light field carrying orbital angular momentum, with a spirally distributed phase surface. It has great application potential in fields such as quantum entanglement, quantum telecommunication, and microparticle control. With further research, structured light carrying more complex topological structures, phase singularities, orbital angular momentums, and polarization singularities than traditional vortex beams has been produced and has drawn the attention of many researchers. Focusing on two distinct mechanisms, i.e., generating spatially structured light straight from a solid-laser cavity and controlling the light field out of solid-laser cavity, we introduce methods on off-axis pumping and astigmatism conversion from the cavity, modulating elements from the cavity, pump shaping from the cavity, customizing the optical field out of cavity by a spatial light modulator, mode superposition out of cavity, and controlling the metasurface microstructures out of cavity. Moreover, the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and the trend in the development of spatial structured light have been described in this article.