Laravel: Up and Running

Preface

The story of how I got started with Laravel is a common one: I had written PHP for years, but I was on my way out the door, pursuing the power of Rails and other modern web frameworks. Rails in particular had a lively community, a perfect combination of opinionated defaults and flexibility, and the power of Ruby Gems to leverage prepackaged common code.

Something kept me from jumping ship, and I was glad for that when I found Laravel. It offered everything I was drawn to in Rails, but it wasn’t just a Rails clone; this was an innovative framework with incredible documentation, a welcoming community, and clear influences from many languages and frameworks.

Since that day I’ve been able to share my journey of learning Laravel through blogging and speaking at conferences; I’ve written dozens of apps in Laravel for side and work projects, and I’ve met thousands of Laravel developers online and in person. I have plenty of tools in my toolkit at our consultancy, but I am honestly happiest when I sit down in front of a command line and type laravel new project.

What This Book Is About

This is not the first book about Laravel, and it won’t be the last. I don’t intend for this to be a book that covers every line of code or every implementation pattern. I don’t want this to be the sort of book that goes out of date when a new version of Laravel is released. Instead, its primary purpose is to provide developers with a high-level overview and concrete examples to learn what they need to get started, as quickly as possible. Rather than mirroring the docs, I want to help you understand the foundational concepts behind Laravel.

Laravel is a powerful and flexible PHP framework. It has a thriving community and a wide ecosystem of tools, and as a result it’s growing in appeal and reach. This book is for developers who already know how to make websites and applications and want to quickly learn how to do so in Laravel.

Laravel’s documentation is thorough and excellent. If you find that I don’t cover any particular topic deeply enough for your liking, I encourage you to visit the online documentation and dig deeper into that particular topic.

I think you will find the book a comfortable balance between high-level introduction and concrete application, and by the end you should feel comfortable writing an entire application in Laravel, from scratch. And, if I did my job well, you’ll be excited to try.

Who This Book Is For

This book assumes knowledge of basic object-oriented programming practices, PHP (or at least the general syntax of C-family languages), and the basic concepts of the Model–View–Controller (MVC) pattern and templating. If you’ve never made a website before, you may find yourself in over your head. But as long as you have some programming experience, you don’t have to know anything about Laravel before you read this book—we’ll cover everything you need to know, from the simplest “Hello, world!”

Laravel can run on any operating system, but there will be some Bash (shell) commands in the book that are easiest to run on Linux/Mac OS. Windows users may have a harder time with these commands and with modern PHP development, but if you follow the instructions to get Homestead (a Linux virtual machine) running, you’ll be able to run all of the commands from there.

How This Book Is Structured

This book is structured in what I imagine to be a chronological order: if you’re building your first web app with Laravel, the early chapters cover the foundational components you’ll need to get started, and the later chapters cover less foundational or more esoteric features.

Each section of the book can be read on its own, but for someone new to the framework, I’ve tried to structure the chapters so that it’s actually very reasonable to start from the beginning and read until the end.

Where applicable, each chapter will end with two sections: “Testing” and “TL;DR.” If you’re not familiar, TL;DR means “too long; didn’t read.” These final sections will show you how to write tests for the features covered in each chapter and give a high-level overview of what was covered.

The book is written for Laravel 5.3, but because Laravel 5.1 is the latest LTS release, any features that are new in 5.2 or 5.3 will be identified.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

Note

This element signifies a general note.

Warning

This element indicates a warning or caution.

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have happened without the gracious support of my amazing wife Tereva or the understanding (“Daddy’s writing, buddy!”) of my son Malachi. And while she wasn’t explicitly aware of it, my daughter Mia was around for almost the entire creation of the book, so this book is dedicated to the whole family. There were many, many long evening hours and weekend Starbucks trips that took me away from my family, and I couldn’t be more grateful for their support and also their presence just making my life awesome.

Additionally, the entire Tighten Co. family has supported and encouraged me through the writing of the book, several even editing (Keith Damiani, editor extraordinaire) and helping me with challenging code samples (Adam Wathan, King of the Collection Pipeline). Dan Sheetz, my partner in Tighten crime, has been gracious enough to watch me while away many a work hour cranking on this book and was nothing but supportive and encouraging; and Dave Hicking, our operations manager, helped me arrange my schedule and work responsibilities around writing time.

Taylor Otwell deserves thanks and honor for creating Laravel—and therefore creating so many jobs and helping so many developers love our lives that much more. He deserves appreciation for how he’s focused on developer happiness and how hard he’s worked to have empathy for developers and to build a positive and encouraging community. But I also want to thank him for being a kind, encouraging, and challenging friend. Taylor, you’re a boss.

Thanks to Jeffrey Way, who I still contend to be one of the best teachers on the Internet. He originally introduced me to Laravel and still introduces more people every day. He’s also, unsurprisingly, a fantastic human being whom I’m glad to call a friend.

Thank you to Jess D’Amico, Shawn McCool, Ian Landsman, and Taylor for seeing value in me as a conference speaker early on and giving me a platform to teach from. Thanks to Dayle Rees for making it so easy for so many to learn Laravel in the early days.

Thanks to every person who put their time and effort into writing blog posts about Laravel, especially early on: Eric Barnes, Chris Fidao, Matt Machuga, Jason Lewis, Ryan Tablada, Dries Vints, Maks Surguy, and so many more.

And thanks to the entire community of friends on Twitter, IRC, and Slack who’ve interacted with me over the years. I wish I could name every name, but I would miss some and then feel awful about missing them. You all are brilliant, and I’m honored to get to interact with you on a regular basis.

Thanks to my O’Reilly editor, Ally MacDonald, and all of my technical editors: Keith Damiani, Michael Dyrynda, Adam Fairholm, and Myles Hyson.

And, of course, thanks to the rest of my family and friends, who supported me directly or indirectly through this process—my parents and siblings, the Gainesville community, other business owners and authors, other conference speakers, and the inimitable DCB. I need to stop writing because by the time I run out of space here I’ll be thanking my Starbucks baristas.