Build Restful API with PHP and Laravel

The PHP Framework For Web Artisans

Introduction

Laravel is one of modern php framework that adopt many features in PHP code,  provide a powerful templating engine and moves the code according to the CLI called artisan. Laravel is easy to udnerstand and it is built on top of a number of components from Symfony, one of PHP's most mature framework. To continue working with this tutorial, you need to have a composer, which basically use in PHP dependency manager. The installation can be further explore on this link. Click here 

Tutorial

To get started, first off lets go to app/routes/web.php and then configure or modify according to code below :

Route::get('names', function()
{
    return array(
      1 => "Hassan",
      2 => "Malik",
      3 => "Syimir"
    );
});

Run the server using CLI command 'php artisan serve' to start remote server. Basically our local host. Then access this address http://localhost/names in our browser, you should see the output comes in array of json.

{"1":"Hassan","2":"Malik","3":"Syimir"}

However we might want to add or browse of endpoint for specific id, the coding file can be written as below :

Route::get('names/{id}', function($id)
{
    $names = array(
      1 => "Hassan",
      2 => "Malik",
      3 => "Syimir"
    );    
    return array($id => $names[$id]);
});

So, if we browse in a specific eg. http://localhost/names/3, you should get the following in JSON format such as below : 

{"3":"Syimir"}

Generally, the example shown are to create endpoints that respond to GET requests. You can change GET request to POST request, for instance, use Route::post instead of Route::get.The idea is to give exposure of Restful APIs using laravel framework and able to use resources efficiently.