Laravel Fundamentals

What is Laravel, and why use a framework?

Laravel gives a PHP application a well-tested structure to follow (MVC), so you spend your time on YOUR app's actual logic instead of reinventing routing, security and database plumbing from scratch every time.

Routing Basics

A route is simply a rule that says "when a visitor asks for this URL, run this code" — it's the very first stop every single request makes inside Laravel.

Controllers

Once a route needs to do anything more than return a one-liner, that logic moves out of routes/web.php and into its own Controller class — a dedicated, organized home for it.

Blade Templating

Blade is Laravel's templating engine — it looks and behaves like ordinary HTML, with a small, friendly set of extra syntax bolted on for displaying data and handling loops and conditions.

Eloquent Models & Migrations

A migration writes down a database table's structure as version-controlled PHP code, and an Eloquent model then gives you a clean, object-oriented way to actually query that table.

Basic CRUD with Eloquent

Create, Read, Update, Delete — the four operations practically every application performs on its data, and with Eloquent each one usually takes just one or two lines of PHP.

Middleware: Filtering Requests Before They Reach a Controller

Middleware sits between an incoming request and your controller, like a security checkpoint — it can inspect, block, or modify a request before it's allowed to continue, or do the same to the response on its way back out.

Form Requests: Clean, Reusable Validation

Validating input directly inside a controller method works, but it clutters the method fast — a Form Request class moves all of that validation logic into its own dedicated, reusable place.

Handling File Uploads

Letting a visitor upload a file — a profile photo, a document — needs a form that says so explicitly, validation that checks what actually arrived, and a deliberate decision about where the file ends up being stored.

API Resources: Returning JSON from a Controller

Not every response needs to be an HTML page — an API Resource shapes an Eloquent model (or a whole collection of them) into exactly the JSON structure you want to hand back to a mobile app, a JavaScript frontend, or any other API consumer.

Eloquent Relationships: hasMany, belongsTo, and Many-to-Many

Real data is connected — a course has many lessons, a lesson belongs to one course, and a student can enroll in many courses while each course has many students. Eloquent relationships describe these connections directly on your models, so you can traverse them like ordinary properties.