Want to read Laravel source, don't know Where to start! Any Tips?

My solution to understanding how laravel works behind the scenes has been;

• Many throw away projects, by doing this i usually find my self googling stuff, but also looking for methods to call on objects so i usually go to the vendor file to look for available methods. This helps me, not only read the laravel source, but also code from other packages. Super helpful
• The other super helpful thing is to read thru the pull requests on github in the project, https://github.com/laravel/framework/pulls. Guaranteed, at first, things are kinda tricky to understand but with time, you start understanding
• The other point that cant be overlooked is following people in the laravel community on twitter, the likes of Aron Francis, Jeffrey Way, Taylor himself, Caleb Porzio, Freek Van der Herten, etc, there are so many smart people in the community that are worth following - basically getting immersed in what these guys are talking about
• The other thing is visiting the laravel news site occasionally - helps a lot too
• Also, you cannot underestimate the power of laravel docs, i personally usually read the docs ahead of time, ie, in my free time, i just check them out - the docs are my bible

Lookup what you need in the API:

https://laravel.com/api/10.x/

An example, laravel uses many symfony components which in turn uses normal php. These you find from the use statements in framework

As example behind the scenes, a file upload uses the normal move_uploaded_file.

https://github.com/symfony/symfony/blob/6.3/src/Symfony/Component/HttpFoundation/File/UploadedFile.php#L172

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.move-uploaded-file.php

The shortcuts in laravel is running pure php in the background.

Blade also converts to php.

Eloquent converts to normal sql at runtime.

Instead of just reading the Laravel source, I find it useful to follow a specific rabbit hole deeper and deeper.

For example, the other day, a client wanted to use temporary signed route, but wanted the response to an invalid signed url be different from the default signed route middleware. Basically, they wanted to throw the standard 403 error when some part of the url changed, but wanted to show a "request another link" page when the timestamp expired.

So I followed the rabbit hole: How is a url actually signed? What makes it different from a temporary signed url? How does the signed middleware work, and how does it check if the url is invalid? How does it check that the date expired? How do those checks work under the hood (for example, whats happening in $request->hasValidSignature())?