Laravel 6 From Scratch

Before we dig into the nuts and bolts of Laravel, let's first zoom out and discuss what exactly happens when a request comes in.

Before we get started, you must first ensure that up-to-date versions of both PHP and MySQL are installed and available on your machine. In this episode, we'll review how to go about this. Once complete, we can then install Composer.

Now that we have Composer setup, we can pull in the Laravel installer and make it accessible globally on our machine. This allows you to run a single command to build a fresh Laravel installation: laravel new app.

When I learn a new framework, the first thing I do is figure out how the framework's default splash page is loaded. Let's work through it together. Our first stop is routes/web.php.

The request() helper function can be used to fetch data from any GET or POST request. In this episode, we'll learn how to fetch data from the query-string, pass it to a view, and then encode it to protected against potential XSS attacks.

Often, you'll need to construct a route that accepts a wildcard value. For example, when viewing a specific post, part of the URI will need to be unique. In these cases, we can reach for a route wildcard.

So far, we've been using a simple array as our data store. This isn't very realistic, so let's learn how to set up a database connection. In this episode, we'll discuss environment variables, configuration files, and the query builder.

In the previous episode, we used the query builder to fetch the relevant post from the database. However, there's a second option we should consider: Eloquent. Not only does an Eloquent class provide the same clean API for querying your database, but it's also the perfect place to store any appropriate business logic.

In a previous episode, we manually created a database table; however, this doesn't reflect the typical workflow you'll follow in your day-to-day coding. Instead, you'll more typically reach for migration classes. In this episode, we'll discuss what they are and why they're useful.

It can quickly become tedious to generate all the various files you need. "Let's make a model, and now a migration, and now a controller." Instead, we can generate everything we need in a single command. I'll show you how in this episode.

If you review the welcome view that ships with Laravel, it contains the full HTML structure all the way up to the doctype. This is fine for a demo page, but in real life, you'll instead reach for layout files.

Using the techniques you've learned in the last several episodes, let's integrate a free site template into our Laravel project, called SimpleWork.

In this episode, you'll learn how to detect and highlight the current page in your navigation bar. We can use the Request facade for this.

Laravel provides a useful tool called Mix - a wrapper around webpack - to assist with asset bundling and compilation. In this episode, I'll show you the basic workflow you'll follow when working on your frontend.

Let's next learn how to render dynamic data. The "about" page of the site template we're using contains a list of articles. Let's create a model for these, store some records in the database, and then render them dynamically on the page.

Let's finish up this exercise by creating a dedicated page for viewing a full article.

There are seven restful controller actions that you should become familiar with. In this episode, we'll review their names and when you would reach for them.

Now that you're familiar with resourceful controllers, let's switch back to the routing layer and review a RESTful approach for constructing URIs and communicating intent.

Now that you understand resourceful controllers and HTTP verbs, let's build a form to persist a new article.

Browsers, at the time of this writing, only recognize GET and POST request types. No problem, though; we can get around this limitation by passing a hidden input along with our request that signals to Laravel which HTTP verb we actually want. Let's review the basic workflow in this episode.

So far. we've been manually fetching a record from the database using a wildcard from the URI. However, Laravel can perform this query for us automatically, thanks to route model binding.

Your next technique is to reduce duplication. If you review our currentArticlesController, we reference request keys in multiple places. Now as it turns out, there's a useful way to reduce this repetition considerably.

Let's now switch back to Eloquent and begin discussing relationships. For example, if I have a $user instance, how might I fetch all projects that were created by that user? Or if I instead have a $project instance, how would I fetch the user who manages that project?

For a deeper dive, please review the Eloquent Relationships Laracasts series.

Let's put our learning from the previous episode to the test. If an article is associated with a user, then we need to add the necessary foreign key and relationship methods. As part of this, though, we'll also quickly review database factories and how useful they can be during the development and testing phase.

Next up, we have the slightly more confusing "many to many" relationship type. To illustrate this, we'll use the common example of articles and tags. As we'll quickly realize, a third table is necessary in order to associate one article with many tags, and one tag with many articles.

Now that we've learned how to construct many-to-many relationships, we can finally display all tags for each article on the page. Additionally, we can now filter all articles by tag.

Thanks to the first-party package, Laravel UI, you can easily scaffold a full registration system that includes sign ups, session handling, password resets, email confirmations, and more. And the best part is you can knock out this tedious and common requirement...in minutes.