Welcome back.

Now that we're getting the hang of routing,

it's a good time to talk about Laravel's command line interface artisan.

Artisan is included with Laravel and

it provides useful commands for common development tasks from

building controllers to database migrations using Tinker.

Tinker is a handy CLI tool that takes in a single user input,

evaluates it, and returns the result to the user.

This tool is also known as REPL, which is short for read, evaluate, print, loop.

Tinker is an excellent tool for database development in general, and

we'll use it to migrate and seed our database.

If you want to browse through a list of available commands at any time,

use php artisan list.

To get started, let's take a closer look at the essential artisan CLI commands.

Artisan provides many helpful commands that speed up development,

complete with a list of available artisan commands at your fingertips.

Just type php artisan list to see the list at any time.

Wow, that's a big list.

But don't worry, in time you'll learn all of these commands one by one as you

start developing more Laravel applications.

You've already used php artisan migrate to test the database

credentials you created earlier.

So you're already on your way.

If you want to see the essential information for

any artisan command, use php artisan help,

followed by the name of the command you want information on, such as migrate.

Remember, if you wanna see a list of all of your routes and

information like the URI, middleware, and

more, use this command, php artisan route:list.

In the next section, you'll use php artisan make colon controller

to create a controller instead of writing it out by hand.

If you want to build a model and you forgot what arguments or

option it takes, just remember to use the artists help command like this.

Maybe you forgot the command to make a controller.

No worries, try this one instead.

When you want to look inside of your database, perform database migrations,

or if you're going to seed your database, use this command, php artisan tinker.

This is the tinker shell.

To exit the shell use Ctrl + C.

Last but not least,

when you need inspiration,

use this command, php artisan inspire.

How cool is that?

As you can see, Laravel provides a cornucopia of robust tools that speed

up the modern web development process.

It's not hard to see why Laravel is the preferred PHP framework in 2020.

Now that we've covered artisan and some of the commands it makes available to us,

let's create our first controller in the next section.

See you there.