Laravel is a free PHP web framework that follows the MVC pattern. It was initiated in 2011 by Taylor Otwell. Laravel’s source code can be accessed via the code hosting platform GitHub and is licensed under the MIT license. Taylor Otwell developed Laravel with the intention of creating a better alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which lacked some features such as authentication and authorization. Laravel 11 was released in March 2024. The biggest change is a leaner folder structure, a new installation of Laravel consists of only 69 files at the beginning.
In the development context, Laravel can be operated locally in environments of varying complexity. In addition to the integrated web server, complex development environments such as “Laravel Sail” or “Homestead” can also be used, which provide services such as ElasticSearch or Redis in addition to common requirements such as the provision of a database.
In the production environment, a server can be set up manually or provisioned via Laravel Forge. In the shared hosting environment, the operation of Laravel is dependent on the deployment strategy. If the PHP dependencies are resolved using Composer on the target system, Composer is assumed as the application. In addition, it is necessary to change the document root directory to the subfolder, which is a special requirement for the provider in shared hosting.
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Features of Laravel
Key features of Laravel include:
- Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) as an extended PHP implementation of the Active Record Pattern.
- Eloquent represents tables as classes, each of whose instances represent a row within the table.
- Blade template engine as a functionally extensible templating language for creating views.
- Database seeding as a way to populate tables as part of a setup or during a unit test.
- Unit Testing
- Automatic loading of PHP classes without the need to manually maintain the inclusion paths.
- Laravel provides the ability to name routes so that they can be identified and used by name within the application. This makes it possible to change the URI at a later date without having to update the routes used separately.
- Migration schemes for version control of database changes.
The Laravel Ecosystem
Numerous services and extensions have been created around Laravel since its foundation.
- Laravel Forge is a SaaS product for provisioning and operating Laravel servers on AWS, Digital Ocean, Hetzner Online or Linode Virtual Private Servers. In addition, it is possible to have vendor-independent servers managed by Forge. It offers the installation of PHP, nginx, MySQL, Redis, beanstalkd and other software, as well as a frontend for managing cron jobs, for example. Taylor Otwell himself is the operator of the platform.
- Laravel Envoyer is a deployment (GitHub, Bitbucket) and monitoring tool for Laravel servers (e.g. from Laravel Forge). This project is also run directly by Taylor Otwell.
- Laracasts.com is a video-on-demand provider for screencasts around web development, especially Laravel and PHP, but also JavaScript frameworks such as Vue.js. Many videos, especially beginner videos, are free, but many others require a monthly fee or alternatively a one-time payment for permanent access[12].
- Laravel Spark is an extension for Laravel 5.2+ that brings user management, a simple frontend, payment options via Stripe and Braintree (and thus PayPal) and many functions for creating a SaaS product. Unlike Laravel, however, it is not free, it does not have to be subscribed, but costs per installation.
- Laravel Nova is a paid extension for Laravel 5.6+ that makes it easier to create a CRUD admin panel. It is programmed and distributed by Taylor Otwell.
- Laravel Horizon is a free extension to manage queues with Redis
- Lumen is a “stripped-down” Laravel framework specifically designed for developing REST APIs. Code developed in Lumen can be easily inserted into Laravel. The project will be programmed in parallel with Laravel by Taylor Otwell.
- Laravel Valet and Homestead are development tools for testing Laravel applications. While Laravel runs valet code directly on the host machine and therefore requires an installed PHP, MySQL, etc., Homestead is a virtual machine with Vagrant and thus does not require a local installation of PHP or other dependencies on Laravel.
- Laravel Telescope is a free extension with advanced debug capabilities. It provides an overview of logs, error messages, database queries, and more.
- Laravel Vapor is a SaaS product designed to easily manage AWS serverless infrastructure. It provides a view of AWS capabilities optimized for Laravel developers and makes it easy to deploy on serverless systems.
- Furthermore, there are the following free libraries written in
- JavaScript: Laravel Echo for WebSocket broadcasting and Laravel Mix for compiling assets via Webpack.
PHP - Laravel Passport for creating OAuth servers
- Laravel Cashier for a Stripe integration
- Laravel Dusk for Browser Testing
- Laravel Scout for full-text search
- Laravel Socialite for integrating SSO from Facebook, GitHub, and other services
- Laravel Tinker command line REPL (Read–eval–print loop) for PHP
