Laravel is a PHP framework that gives you the tools you need to create sophisticated web applications, but it also allows you to focus on the application logic. It’s built with modern language features and supports multiple databases out of the box.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a PHP framework built on the principle of convention over configuration. It’s a fully open-source, community-driven project that focuses on simplicity and elegance in building web applications.

Laravel was created by Taylor Otwell in 2010 and has become one of the most popular PHP frameworks today.

Laravel is built on top of the Symfony component library, which means it’s already familiar to many developers who are already familiar with Symfony. The whole point of Laravel is to provide a convention over configuration approach with minimal boilerplate code required by developers in order to get up and running quickly when building web apps.

I was giving an example to one of my friends with Jetstream. It takes a single command to generate an entire login, logout, and profile management system, with MFA and session management.

Why Use Laravel?

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework. It’s a modern framework for web development that follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Laravel leverages the expressive, elegant syntax of PHP to provide an elegant syntax for building command line interfaces and web applications in general.

Surprisingly, it’s not necessary to know any PHP if you’re starting out with Laravel; however, familiarity with databases and the MVC pattern does help.

Getting Started with Laravel

This is going to be the topic of the next article, but it really is as simple as running:

curl -s "https://laravel.build/your-app-name" | bash

The only other pre-requisite that we’ll have is that we’ll use Docker for everything, which we’ll also cover.

What Can You Do in Laravel?

Aside from pretty robust websites, you’ll be able to create API’s that work with other API’s or the frontend. It allows for as much separation that you want between the frontend and the backend.

I’ve personally built:

• Websites and used Blade components with HTML for frontend
• API’s providing data to the front-end written in React.js and Vue.js.
• API’s providing data to mobile apps built with SwiftUI and Android.
• Event Sourcing applications.
• Rules Engines.
• The list can go on for quite a while so we’ll just stop it right here for now.

Ready to Start?

I’m actually excited to start this series. I hope that I can help demystify Laravel and present it in an easily digestible format. I’ve thought about how to make this series for quite some time and I think I have some ideas on how to start easy and ramp up to some advanced concepts. Hope to see you along the journey.