Laravel Fundamentals: Getting Started with the PHP Framework
Posted on March 1st, 2023
Laravel is a free and open-source PHP web framework that has gained popularity among developers for its ease of use, flexibility, and modern features. It offers a rich set of tools and features that help developers build robust and scalable web applications quickly and efficiently.
However, if you’re new to Laravel, getting started can be a bit intimidating. That’s where this article comes in. In this article, we’ll guide you through the fundamentals of Laravel, from installation and setup to creating views, controllers, and models, and integrating with databases.
Whether you’re a PHP developer looking to learn Laravel or a beginner who wants to dive into web development, this article will provide you with a solid foundation for using Laravel to build your web applications. So, let’s get started with Laravel Fundamentals!
Why Laravel over other PHP frameworks?
There is no doubt, Laravel is the most popular PHP frameworks available in the market right now. Here are some features that Laravel provides that you cannot find in other PHP frameworks.
- Modular Structure: Laravel follows a modular structure that allows developers to organize their code into separate, reusable components. This makes it easier to maintain and scale applications over time.
- Built-In Features: Laravel comes with built-in features like authentication, authorization, and caching, which can save developers time and effort when building web applications.
- Blade Templating Engine: Laravel’s Blade templating engine provides a simple syntax for creating views, layouts, and reusable components, making it easier to create dynamic, responsive user interfaces.
- Eloquent ORM: Laravel’s Eloquent ORM makes it easy to interact with databases using object-oriented syntax, reducing the amount of time and code needed to perform database operations.
- Testing Support: Laravel provides robust support for testing, with built-in tools for unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing. This helps ensure that applications are stable and bug-free.
- Community Support: Laravel has a large and active community of developers who contribute to the framework, create packages, and provide support through forums, tutorials, and other resources.
With Laravel, You can also easily install existing PHP packages for various purposes. For example, You can use maatwebsite/excel package to work with excel and CSV files. Now, Let’s understand how to deploy a new Laravel project in the local environment.
Prerequisites
Before you can start working on your Laravel project:
- Set up LAMP Stack
- Install Composer
Once you have LAMP stack and composer installed, You can move forward to create a blank Laravel project in your machine.
Install and Execute a New Laravel Project
As now we have all the pre-requisites taken care of, we can deploy a new Laravel project using the following command.
$ composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel directory_name
Execute the above given command in the directory where you want to store the Laravel files. Also, do not forget to replace directory_name with the actual project directory name. If you already have a directory for your project, Navigate to that directory and execute the command with “.” as directory_name. This way, It will download and configure all the Laravel files in the current directory.
After the Laravel project is successfully installed, Navigate to the project directory and execute the following command to start your new Laravel project.
$ php artisan serve
After executing the above given command, You can acess your new Laravel project at the following location.
http://localhost:8000
If you are unable to access your project at this URL, You will be able to see the correct URL in the terminal.
Understanding Laravel Architecture
To effectively use Laravel, it’s important to understand its underlying architecture and how it works. Laravel follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which separates the application logic into three interconnected components: the model, the view, and the controller.
- Model: The model represents the data and the business logic of the application. It interacts with the database to retrieve and store data, and provides methods for manipulating and validating data.
- View: The view represents the user interface of the application. It’s responsible for rendering the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that the user interacts with. In Laravel, views are created using the Blade templating engine, which provides a simple and intuitive syntax for creating reusable components.
- Controller: The controller acts as the intermediary between the model and the view. It receives requests from the user and retrieves data from the model, and then passes that data to the view for rendering. In Laravel, controllers are responsible for defining the application’s routes and handling requests from the user.
In addition to the MVC pattern, Laravel also uses a number of other components and concepts, including:
- Service Container: Laravel’s service container is a powerful tool for managing dependencies and resolving classes and objects. It allows developers to easily manage and inject dependencies into their application.
- Middleware: Middleware are small classes that can be used to modify the request and response objects of an application. They can be used for tasks such as authentication, caching, and logging.
- Routing: Laravel’s routing system provides a simple and flexible way to define the URLs and endpoints of an application, and map them to specific controller methods.
- Artisan: Laravel’s command-line interface, called Artisan, provides a number of useful tools and commands for managing and debugging Laravel applications.
By understanding the architecture and components of Laravel, developers can build efficient and maintainable web applications that are easy to extend and scale over time. In the next section, we’ll explore how to create views and templates in Laravel using the Blade templating engine.
Working with Views
Views are an essential component of any web application, and in Laravel, views are created using the Blade templating engine. Blade provides a simple and intuitive syntax for creating reusable components and layouts, and allows developers to easily separate the presentation logic from the business logic of their application.
Creating a Basic View: To create a new view in Laravel, you can simply create a new Blade template file in the resources/views directory. For example, let’s create a new view called welcome.blade.php, which will display a welcome message to the user:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my Laravel application!</h1>
</body>
</html>
Once you’ve created a view, you can render it in your application using the view function. For example, let’s render the welcome view in a new route:
Route::get('/', function () {
return view('welcome');
});
Now, When you will visit the homepage of your Laravel project, You will see the welcome.blade.php file. This is the most basic explaination of creating and managing views. You can also organise views for your project in different directories as well as create Layouts so that you do not have to re-write same code multiple times for your project.
Working with Controllers
In Laravel, controllers are responsible for handling user requests and processing application logic. Controllers receive requests from routes and use models and views to generate responses to the user.
To create a new controller in Laravel, you can use the make:controller Artisan command. For example, let’s create a new controller called HomeController. Execute the following command to create a new controller in your Laravel project.
$ php artisan make:controller HomeController
This will create a new file called HomeController.php in the app/Http/Controllers directory. Once you’ve created a controller, you can define methods that correspond to different routes in your application. For example, let’s define a index method in our HomeController that will return a view:
public function index()
{
$name = 'John Doe';
return view('welcome', ['name' => $name]);
}
Once you’ve defined your controller and its actions, you can register routes that will map incoming requests to the appropriate controller action. For example, let’s register a new route in the web.php file that will map requests to the root URL of our application to the index method of our HomeController.
Route::get('/', 'HomeController@index');
Now, when a user navigates to the root URL of our application, Laravel will invoke the index method of the WelcomeController, which will return the welcome view with the user’s name. You can also pass additional data from controller to view by storing the required information in a variable and returning it using “with” function in Laravel.
Similarly, You can create multiple methods in a single controller for various operations on a specific model. For example, If you want to create a CRUD application with Users, You will have all the actions for a user in the UserController like Login, register, index, delete, update, etc.
Working with Models
In Laravel, models are responsible for representing and manipulating the data of an application. Models provide a convenient way to interact with databases, and allow developers to encapsulate the underlying data and business logic of an application in a single object-oriented class.
To create a new model in Laravel, you can use the make:model Artisan command. For example, let’s create a new model called Post that will represent blog posts in our application:
$ php artisan make:model Post
Executing this command will generate a new Post.php file in the app/Models directory. When you open Post.php, You will see a very basic PHP class that extends “Model” class in Laravel. In this file, You can define the fields, or properties of your model. For example, For our Post model, We can define:
protected $fillable = [ ‘title’, ‘body’, ‘author’, ];
After defining it in the model, You can simply use Post::create($request->all()); after validating the data to create a new post instance.
In addition to that, You also define model relationships to retrive data easily from a specific instance of a specific model. For example, A post can have relationship with an author. In that case, You can add the following function to create a relationship with author model.
public function author()
{
return $this->belongsTo(Author::class);
}
After defining this function in the model, You can simply access the author of a specific post by using $post->author;. It is very easy and convinient with Eloquent. You can also chain the relationships with some exceptions.
So, this is how you work with Laravel models.
Other Important Laravel Features
There are many other things in Laravel that you will regularly use. For example,
- Artisan Commands: In Laravel, You can use Artisan to create custom commands for specific use cases. For example, Updating subscriptions of your customers every night. Or generating invoices on 1st of every month automatically.
- Authentication and Authorization: Laravel provides built-in authentication and authorization features that make it easy to secure your application. With Laravel’s authentication scaffolding, you can quickly generate a login and registration system, and use middleware to control access to different parts of your application.
- Queues: Laravel’s queue system allows you to defer the processing of time-consuming tasks, such as sending emails or processing images, to a background process. This can help improve the performance and scalability of your application.
- Migrations: You can think of migrations as your database schema. With migrations, You can create and modify the table schema in minutes and also maintain the versioning. It also allows you to modify the schema after your application is in production. So, It is a very important feature that you will regularly use when working with Laravel.
So, these are all the things that will help you master Laravel.
Conclusion
In this guide, we discussed the fundamentals of Laravel, a popular PHP framework for building web applications. We started by looking at some of the benefits of using Laravel over other PHP frameworks, including its expressive syntax, powerful features, and active community. We then discussed how to install and set up Laravel, and explored its architecture, including the role of views, controllers, and models. We also looked at some of the key features of Laravel, including its Blade templating engine, Eloquent ORM, authentication and authorization system, routing system, queue system, and testing framework.
In conclusion, Laravel is a powerful and flexible PHP framework that can help you build robust and scalable web applications. Whether you’re a seasoned PHP developer or just getting started, Laravel provides a great foundation for building modern web applications in no time. By following this guide only, You can learn to build basic applications in Laravel.
We hope this guide helped you with understanding Laravel from fundamentals. If you have any questions, Feel free to comment down in the comment section.
