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.

Our first core concept is collection chaining. As you've surely learned by now, when fetching multiple records from a database, a Collection instance is returned. Not only does this object serve as a wrapper around your result set, but it also provides dozens upon dozens of useful manipulation methods that you'll reach for in every project you build.

Laravel provides Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection out of the box, but you still may not know exactly what that means. In this lesson, I'll show you a few examples of how a CSRF attack is executed, as well as how Laravel protects your application against them.

Laravel's service container is one of the core pillars of the entire framework. Before we review the real implementation, let's first take a few moments to build a simple service container from scratch. This will give you an instant understanding of what happens under the hood when you bind and resolve keys.

Now that you understand the basics of a service container, let's switch over to Laravel's implementation. As you'll see, in addition to the basics, it can also, in some cases, automatically construct objects for you. This means you can "ask" for what you need, and Laravel will do its best - using PHP's reflection API - to read the dependency graph and construct what you need!

Now that you have a basic understanding of the service container, we can finally move on to Laravel facades, which provide a convenient static interface to all of the framework's underlying components. In this lesson, we'll review the basic structure, how to track down the underlying class, and when you might choose not to use them.

The easiest way to send an email in Laravel is with the Mail::raw() method. In this lesson, we'll learn how to submit a form, read a provided email address from the request, and then fire off an email to the person.

It's useful to view a log of any mail that is sent while in development mode, but let's switch over to using Mailtrap. This will allow us to simulate a real-life email inbox, which will be especially useful once we begin sending HTML email.

So far, we've only managed to send a basic plain-text email. Let's upgrade to a full HTML-driven email by leveraging Laravel's mailable classes.

We can alternatively write emails using Markdown! In this lesson, you'll learn how to send nicely formatted emails constructed by the framework. For the cases when you need to tweak the underlying HTML structure, we'll also publish the mailable assets and review how to create custom themes.

A notification may be dispatched through any number of "channels." Perhaps a particular notification should alert the user via email and through the website. Sure, no problem! Let's learn how in this episode.

For any typical web application, some actions should be limited to authorized users. Perhaps only the creator of a conversation may select which reply best answered their question. If this is the case, we'll need to write the necessary authorization logic. I'll show you how in this lesson!

There will almost certainly be users in your application who should receive special privileges and access. As examples, consider a forum moderator or site administrator. In these cases, we can declare before and after authorizations filters before the intended policy ability is tested.

Here's an optional feature that you might consider. If you exclude the ability name when authorizing from your controllers, Laravel will do it's best to guess the appropriate policy method to call. It does so by creating a map for the typical restful controller actions and their associated policy methods.

If you'd prefer not to execute authorization from within your controller actions, you can instead handle it as a route-specific middleware. I'll show you how in this episode.