Laravel Simplified Version

This is a simple boilerplate code for laravel without any fancy stuff. Most built-in middlewares and service provider have been removed from the app to make it as simple as possible.

Getting started

1. Install PHP 8.0 and composer as illustrated in the slide
2. Clone the repository
3. Checkout to the branch simple-api using git checkout simple-api
4. Install dependencies by running composer install
5. Run php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 server.php to start the api server.
6. [optional] Copy the .env.example file as .env later on

Recommended extensions to use

• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DEVSENSE.phptools-vscode
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DEVSENSE.composer-php-vscode

Project directory

api-backend/
├── app/
│   ├── Console/Kernel
│   ├── Exceptions/Handler
│   ├── Http/
│   │   ├── Controllers/
│   │   ├── Kernel
│   ├── Models/
│   ├── Providers/
│   └── Services/
├── bootstrap/
├── config/
├── database/
│   ├── migrations/
├── public/

Creating a controller

php artisan make:controller TestController

This will create a controller file in app/Http/Controllers.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class TestController extends Controller
{
    public function getTestHuman(Request $request)
    {
        return "This is a test human response from TestController";
    }
 
}

Now, we need to add this to our routes/api.php route.

Route::get('/test', [TestController::class, 'getTestHuman']);

Note that we only have 1 file in routes folder. The rest of the files were removed to make it easy to understand.

Now, if we make a GET request to http://localhost:8000/api/test, the getTestHuman() function should be executed and we should see a response saying "This is a test human response from TestController"

Similarly, we can do POST/PUT/DELETE operations.

What if we want to make a GET request with a route parameter? like this: http://localhost:8000/api/test/120. How can we obtain the value 120?

We do this with $request->route('<route-param-key>')

class TestController extends Controller
{
    public function getTestHumanWithId(Request $request)
    {
        $id = $request->route('id');
        return "This is a test human response from TestController with id: $id";
    }
}

Route::get('/test/{id}', [TestController::class, 'getTestHumanWithId']);

Creating a service

Controllers shouldn't deal with business logic. That's the job of the Services. To create a new service, make a folder called Services in app/Services and create a new file named TestService.php

<?php

namespace App\Services;

class TestService
{
    public function getTestHuman()
    {
        return "Test human returned from TestService";
    }
}

Now, we need to use this service in our TestController. To do this, we can use dependency injection to inject this directly in the constructor.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Services\TestService;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class TestController extends Controller
{
    private $testService;

    public function __construct(TestService $testService)
    {
        $this->testService = $testService;
    }

    public function getTestHuman(Request $request)
    {
        $data = $this->testService->getTestHuman();
        return $data;
    }
}

Creating a middleware

To create a middleware, we can run the command:

php artisan make:middleware TestMiddleware

This will create a TestMiddleware in app/Http/Middleware. Add the following code to it:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Closure;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class TestMiddleware
{
    public function handle(Request $request, Closure $next)
    {
        if (!$request->input('token')) {
            return response()->json([
                'error' => 'Unauthorized access',
                'message' => 'Invalid or missing token.',
            ], 401);
        }

        return $next($request);
    }
}

Now, we need to tell Laravel, when this middleware should work. We do this in the app/Http/Kernel.php file. We can either attach it to the global middleware ($middleware) or as route middlewares ($routeMiddleware).

For this example, let's attach this as a route middleware:

protected $routeMiddleware = [
    'test.middleware' =>\App\Http\Middleware\TestMiddleware::class,
];

Now that you have registered the middleware in the $routeMiddleware array, you can apply it to specific routes by using its alias (test.middleware):

Route::get('/test', [TestController::class, 'getTestHuman'])->middleware('test.middleware');

Troubleshoot

1. Sometimes, cached routes can cause issues if routes have changed but the cache hasn't been cleared. You can clear the route cache by running the following command: php artisan route:clear
2. Display all available routes in your application: php artisan route:list
3. php artisan cache:clear