Library

Build a REST API with Laravel

113-minute PHP Course

Start Course
  • PHP
  • Intermediate

About this Course

Build a REST API using one of the most popular PHP frameworks, Laravel. In this course you'll learn how to implement CRUD operations in a Laravel REST API using the MVC design pattern.

What you'll learn

  • Design a REST API
  • Build CRUD operations
  • Produce Resource Controllers
  • Implement Namespacing, Groups, and Route Name Prefixes
  • Produce Endpoints and Routes
  • Test API Endpoints

Seeding the Database

In this course, we’ll build a REST API with Laravel that allows you to submit your favorite books and authors. The REST API we’re building, from scratch -- can return a list of books with authors and also allows you to submit, update and delete books and authors. First, we need to spin up a Laravel project, then create and seed our database. Let’s get started!

Chevron 6 steps

API Basics & CRUD operations

Now that we’ve set up our Laravel application and created factories that generate our test data, we’re ready to explore the differences between Controllers and Resource Controllers. The main difference between the two controllers is that Resource Controllers include all of the CRUD goodies, pre-built for us making this development task a snap. Let's get started!

Chevron 3 steps

Accessing Data with Resources

Why exactly do we want to use Resources? To answer this question, we’ll examine each piece of data and decide which specific pieces will be displayed to the API consumer. For example, it's best practice to hide author IDs, timestamps and passwords because we don’t want to share sensitive or irrelevant data to the users of our API. It’s also worth noting that exposing Author ID’s can give your API consumers an idea of the size of your database which you may not want to make public.

Chevron 5 steps

Clean Routes and Validation Messages

You created a Laravel app, connected the MySQL database, migrated then seeded the database using Factories. On top of that, you built CRUD operations using controllers, removed database-specific data using Resources, and combined it all with building your very own REST API using the Laravel framework. In this section, we're going to add the finishing touches to optimize our Routes and make them scalable and clean. Clean routes will allow you to work with large applications that use a large number of Routes. Let's get started!

Chevron 4 steps

Teachers

  • Jonathan Barrios

    I'm a software development teacher!

  • Abrahm Overcast

    Software Engineer for the better part of ten years. Let's learn together!

Download videos

You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course videos.

Sign up