I’m using the laravel-base as starting point. For starter, the laravel-base’s Readme.md already covering it well.

Contents

• Database Tables
• Model
• Controller
• Routing
• Views
• Helpers

Database Tables

Since I want to store some data in the db, the first thing to do is to create the table’s schema. You accomplish this using the artisan command:-

php artisan make:migration create_customers_table --create=customers

This will create the schema migration file in database/migrations/2015_12_06_095232_create_customers_table.php. The file look like:-

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateCustomersTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('customers', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->timestamps();
            $table->string('name', 255);
            $table->text('address');
            $table->string('phone_no', 255);
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('customers');
    }
}

The column id and timestamps were added by default but you have to add other column manually. Once you have filled up the file with all the column you want, you can run the migrate command to let laravel create the corresponding database table:-

php artisan migrate

Model

To interact with the database, Laravel use an ORM named Eloquent. To create the model, we can ru the command:-

php artisan make:model Customer

This will create a file named Customer.php in the app/ folder. I wish the artisan command show the exact path where the files being generated instead of just showing:-

Model created successfully.

Controller

Controller will be the meat of the application as this is where user request being processed. To create the controller, we run the command:-

php artisan make:controller CustomerController

This will create a file app/Http/Controllers/CustomerController.php. The file will contain a class with some pre-defined methods:-

<?php
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Display a listing of the resource.
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
     */
    public function index(){}
    public function create(){}
    public function store(){}
    public function store(Request $request) {}
    public function edit($id) {}
    ...

Routing

Having a controller alone is not enough as Laravel still don’t know about the controller and it relation with the incoming request. So we need to define a route that will match the url user request with the controller. Open /app/Http/routes.php and add the routing config:-

<?php
Route::resource('customer', 'CustomerController');

With above route definition, if you try to access url such as http://localhost:8000/customer, Laravel will execute the index() method in CustomerController class. This is where I got stucked initially, as the existing routes defined in laravel-base look like this:-

<?php

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

Route::controller('auth', 'Auth\AuthController');
Route::controller('password', 'Auth\PasswordController');

Notice that they’re using Route::controller instead. Turn out there are 2 types of controller in Laravel - RESTFull resource controller and Implicit controller. The one generated with the artisan command basically a resource controller so that’s why you should attach it to the route with Route::resource() and not Route::controller().

Views

The controller should return an output (or HTTP speak, a response) to user. At the very basic, we can just return a plain string:-

<?php
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Display a listing of the resource.
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
     */
    public function index()
    {
        return 'Hello world !';
    }

But as the comment in above method mention, the method supposed to return a Response object. If we return a plain string, Laravel will wrap it into a Response object but we can also explicitly return a Response object:-

<?php
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Display a listing of the resource.
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
     */
    public function index()
    {
        return new Response('Hello world !', 200);
    }

The second argument to Response() which is a HTTP status code to return is optional but that’s the advantage of returning a Response object, as it allow us to return custom status code instead of the default 200 OK. However most of the time what we would return from controller is a Views instead:-

<?php
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
    /**
     * Display a listing of the resource.
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response
     */
    public function index()
    {
        return view('customers/list');
    }

Views basically a template that contain the actual response we want to return to user. As in above code, Laravel will look for file called resources/views/customers/list.blade.php. Blade is the default templating language used by Laravel. The file list.blade.php is just like the regular HTML file but with some special syntax:-

@extends('app')

@section('content')
    <div class="container">
        <div class="content">
            <div class="title">Customers</div>
        </div>
    </div>
@stop

Helpers

Coming from Django, one thing that I’d immediately looked into is the ability to generate url from the defined routing. In Django it’s called reverse url routing. In Laravel, this exists in the form of helpers function called route(). You can pass the routing name to the function and it will return the corresponding url. For example:-

route('customer.index') // will return /customer/

For resource controller, the name is automatically generated and you can refer the documentation on the available name. In the Views template, you can call the function like this:-

@extends('app')

@section('content')
    <div class="container">
        <div class="content">
            <div class="title">Customers</div>
            <form action="{{ route('customer.store') }}" method="post">
                <input type="text" name="name" />
            </form>
        </div>
    </div>
@stop

That’s all for now. Hopefully I can show more in-depth example as I progress forward in learning Laravel.