Laravel

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for web application development following the MVC architectural pattern. It provides an expressive syntax aimed at making web development tasks, such as routing, caching, and security, easier.

Setting Up a Laravel Project

You can set up a new Laravel project using Composer. The Laravel installer is often used to speed up the initial project setup.

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

Routing

Routes define the URLs for your application and how they respond to client requests. You can define routes in Laravel by creating files in the `routes` directory.

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

Middleware

Middleware provides a convenient mechanism for filtering HTTP requests entering your application, like verifying the user's authentication.

public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
    if ($request->age <= 200) {
        return redirect('home');
    }

    return $next($request);
}

Controllers

Instead of defining all request handling logic in your route files, you can organize this behavior using Controller classes.

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function show($id)
    {
        return view('user.profile', ['user' => User::findOrFail($id)]);
    }
}

Configuring Databases

Laravel makes interacting with databases extremely simple across a variety of database backends using either raw SQL, the fluent query builder, and the Eloquent ORM.

DB::table('users')->where('name', 'John')->first();

Eloquent ORM

Eloquent ORM provides a simple ActiveRecord implementation for working with your database. Each database table has a corresponding 'Model' which is used to interact with that table.

$user = User::find(1);
echo $user->name;

Migrations

Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing your team to define and share the application's database schema definition.

php artisan make:migration create_users_table

Introduction to Blade

Blade is the simple, yet powerful templating engine provided with Laravel. Unlike other PHP templating engines, Blade does not restrict you from using plain PHP code in your views.

@extends('layouts.app')

@section('content')
    <p>This is my body content.</p>
@endsection

Form Handling

Laravel provides several tools and libraries to assist in form creation and submission. You can utilize the CSRF field, old inputs, and validation errors.

<form action='/upload' method='POST'>
    @csrf
    <input name='photo' type='file'>
    <input type='submit'>
</form>

Authentication

Laravel's authentication services provide a very simple way to authenticate users. It provides a quick way to scaffold all of the routes and views you need for authentication using a few simple commands.

php artisan make:auth

Authorization

In addition to providing authentication services out of the box, Laravel also provides a simple way to authorize user actions against a given resource.

@can('update', $post)
    <!-- The current user can update the post... -->
@endcan

CSRF Protection

Laravel makes it easy to protect your application from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.

<form method='POST' action='/profile'>
    @csrf
    ...
</form>