Featured Building REST APIs with Laravel PHP Framework

Why Laravel?

Laravel is a powerful PHP framework that makes building APIs fast and elegant with built-in features like authentication, validation, and database migrations.

Creating Laravel API Project

# Install Laravel
composer create-project laravel/laravel my-api

# Create API controller
php artisan make:controller Api/UserController --api

# Create model and migration
php artisan make:model User -m

API Routes

// routes/api.php
use AppHttpControllersApiUserController;

Route::apiResource('users', UserController::class);

Controller Implementation

namespace AppHttpControllersApi;

use AppHttpControllersController;
use AppModelsUser;
use IlluminateHttpRequest;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return User::all();
    }
    
    public function store(Request $request)
    {
        $validated = $request->validate([
            'name' => 'required|string|max:255',
            'email' => 'required|email|unique:users'
        ]);
        
        $user = User::create($validated);
        return response()->json($user, 201);
    }
}

Best Practices

• Use API resources for consistent responses
• Validate all input data
• Use pagination for large datasets
• Implement rate limiting
• Use API versioning