From the course: Accelerating Laravel API Development with AI: From Specification to Testing

Laravel for REST APIs - Laravel Tutorial

From the course: Accelerating Laravel API Development with AI: From Specification to Testing

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Laravel for REST APIs

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- [Narrator] When building a REST API, a simple, expressive framework can really help cut down the boilerplate code. Laravel is a great option if PHP is your language of choice. One of the key things to consider when building a REST API is the routing, and specifically, route prefixes, and prefixes can be within prefixes. This is an easy way to visualize depth. Another useful feature is middleware. Middleware is a way to filter or inspect requests before they enter your application, useful for authentication or other validation you may need before performing an action. Eloquent is the ORM in Laravel. ORM is a way to interact with code via objects rather than writing SQL queries. With Laravel, you will use Eloquent to build REST responses. Baked into Eloquent, and pretty foundational in thinking about models and REST requests, are resources. A resource is a transformation layer to manipulate the return object or properties, and sometimes related models. Now, I touched on it in middleware, but Auth is often necessary in API work. Laravel Sanctum provides token management as well as token abilities. Another feature of Laravel that is helpful when building an API is validation. While you could write validation manually before leveraging the Eloquent ORM, Laravel provides extensive tooling for validation. Finally, Laravel provides everything you need to run automated tests. Often, the API logic for endpoint is relatively simple, and writing tests for it is equally as simple. In addition to tooling, Laravel obviously has great documentation. It's a wonderful framework to build REST APIs.

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