Getting Started

The Ecosystem

At the very minimum, you need to know how to use Git and Composer. Though not required, it is better that you have an account on GitHub.com as it is where all the code and its’ dependencies are hosted.

For local development, you’ll need to have at least Vagrant and VirtualBox installed. This is used by Homestead (a special vagrant box made for running Laravel apps). Although you can use the traditional WAMP/MAMP/XAMPP stack, those are not officially supported, thus you might have hard time down the road.

Pure “Laravel-way” frontend development might be a daunting one as it got has a long chain of technologies. At the very top of the chain is Elixir, which is basically an API for GulpJS, which in turn requires npm which is basically a package manager for NodeJS.

CSS is managed either through Sass or LESS, while JavaScript is through CoffeeScript. You can write ES6/ES7 code since Elixir also supports BabelJS. While NodeJS dependencies are then made available to browsers through Browserify.

For the backend stack, at the very least, you need a web server like Nginx, a php interpreter like PHP-FPM and a database like MySQL. Other optional stack components are Memcached, Redis and Beanstalkd.

While you are not required to understand them all at once, it is advantagous that you are at least familiar with these and do some reading about what they are and where they are being used. This will save you tons of confusion when reading the documentation and references in the future.

Use the Current Stable Version (5.5)

If you are getting started with Laravel, start with the current stable release of Laravel 5.5. Laravel has added powerful new features over the last few years. If you are looking for a function or its usage, the documentation on the laravel.com/docs website will have the answer.

Homestead

Laravel is not only using Vagrant as the official development environment but also has its own base box called “Homestead”. You can use Homestead to start developing with Laravel without the hassle of setting up your local environment for Laravel.

The instructions and usage of homestead can be found in the Official Documentation.

Build your own Homestead

Homestead comes with pre-installed software. If you want to customize the installed software, you will need to have access to the scripts that is used to build Homestead itself. This project is called “Settler”. You can check the source code of that project to have a better understanding of how Homestead was built, and probably add your own scripts as well.

Code Style Guide

The Laravel framework itself doesn’t impose standards on how you should name your variables or where to put files. As long as it can be loaded by Composer, it will technically run inside the application. However, developers are encouraged to study and follow the following PSR standards:

• PSR-1
• PSR-2
• PSR-4

Framework Highlights

Programming Paradigms

Design Patterns

There are several design patterns that power Laravel. Phill Sparks has a wonderful presentation about this.

How Laravel Works?

Christopher Pitt has an impressive explanation of the inner workings of Laravel, you can check it out in http://rebuildinglaravel.com/

Eloquent ORM

The most popular feature of Laravel is its rockstar ORM called Eloquent. It’s the easiest way to use an ORM in your application. You can read more about Eloquent in the official documentation.

Command Line Interface

Laravel comes with its own command line interface called Artisan. It basically uses the Symfony Console component as its foundation. Laracasts has good tutorials on understanding how commands works and how to make your own.

Debugging

Laravel’s cool error page is something that it is known for, thanks to the Whoops library which powers the error page you see whenever there is an error.

Note that the Whoops library has been removed from Laravel 5.

Dependency Management

Laravel is not built from scratch. It is built on top of several frameworks and libraries. You can see the list of other libraries it uses here. It is also powered by Illuminate components. All of these components are combined by making sure each of them can be treated and written as a composer Composer library. These libraries are hosted in public repositories.

Composer and Packagist

By default, Packagist is used as a package repository and GitHub to download the files itself. But you can define your own repositories by setting up your own Satis mirror of packages. Although you can use any class or even plain php functions inside Laravel (as long as it can be autoloaded). This is not a recommended practice. Make your own Composer library for each application specific set of classes and include it as a dependency in the composer.json file.

Laravel Package Archivists

These are the sites where you can find Laravel Packages:

• Packalyst - Find and place package requests.
• Packagist Laravel - Find Laravel packages in Packagist.

Coding Practices

The Basics

Laravel has tons of features which might be overwhelming at first.

Here are some articles and resources that may be useful to get on the same page with Laravel.

• Composer: Part 1 – What & Why?
• Why use an autoloader? why just don’t require the files?
• Why CodeIgniter over Laravel - 5 Things CodeIgniter cannot do without a rewrite?
• How to install Laravel in WAMP?
• Object-Oriented Bootcamp on Laracasts
• Laravel 5 from Scratch on Laracasts

Date and Time

Although PHP has a class named DateTime to help you when reading, writing, comparing or calculating with date and time. It is recommended that you use the Carbon library for dealing with dates.

Design Patterns

It is easy to mess up your Laravel application if you don’t have any sort of pattern to follow. The following design patterns are recommended for those who are building an application with Laravel or want to refactor their existing projects:

• Domain Driven Design
• Don’t call Eloquent models directly, Use Repositories!
• Inversion Of Control Container and Dependency Injection
• SOLID Principle

Working with UTF-8

Laravel uses the patchwork/utf8 for most of its UT8-related stuff. It is required that all developers understands the following concepts:

• Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues
• Handling UTF-8 with PHP
• Unicode Normalization
• Grapheme Clusters
• Unicode Security Considerations

Database Conventions

Eloquent can support multiple Database for a reason - Don’t limit yourself to MySQL.

Use MongoDB for records that have attributes that vary a lot. For example, in an inventory system, an office supplies product might have a different set of fields compared to vehicle and auto supplies.

Use ElasticSearch for high volume data searching and indexing.

Use Neo4J for applications that require complex relationships between models. For example a multi-level networking application, social network site and similar apps.

Table and field naming

Table and field names MUST be lowercase and use Snake Case.

Table names should use the plural form of the actual real life object it is storing. Like for example, the table name for blog posts should be posts not post.

Primary keys should be named “id” in the table names. While the foreign key it represents in other table should be on singularform_id. (e.g. table: post, primary key: id, foreign key: post_id )

Changing tables, index or inserting sample data.

DON’T create tables or index directly via PHPMyAdmin or console. Use database migration to create table, add/alter any fields, and commit those to Git repository.

DON’T directly pass the database export (sql files) to your colleagues in order to share your database changes. Let them run the migration files you committed to the repository.

DON’T insert fake values directly into the database for testing purposes. Create Seeder files to populate your database.

Choose right database for the job at hand.

Eloquent can support multiple databases for a reason - don’t limit yourself to MySQL.

Use MongoDB for records that have attributes that vary a lot. For example, in an inventory system, an office supplies product might have a different set of fields compared to vehicle and auto supplies.

Use ElasticSearch for high volume data searching and indexing. It is also useful on systems that requires sharding of data across multiple machines which is very huge to fit in a single replica.

Use Neo4J for applications that requires complex relationships between models. For example a multi-level networking application, social network site and alike. Although you can do the same in MySQL, the amount of joins when you go beyond 2-level parent-child relationships will be unbearable in any production environment.

Configuration

Always make sure your application key is set. This is the APP_KEY variable in your .env file. You can generate one via

php artisan key:generate

Always give your application a name. That is, instead of using the default App root namespace given by Laravel install, set it to what the application is all about. This can be set via

php artisan app:name YourAppName

This makes your controllers/models etc resolve into YourAppName\Controllers and YourAppName\Models.

Use .env files to store any secure information and retrieve it via getenv function. These should be no instance on which you will put it inside models/controllers and commit it to Git.

Resources

From the Source

• Laravel Website
• Laravel Documentation

People to Follow

• Taylor Otwell
• Dayle Rees
• Shawn McCool
• Jeffrey Way
• Chris Fidao
• Phil Sturgeon
• Jens Segers
• Ben Corlett
• Matt Stauffer
• Graham Campbell

Mentoring

• Laravel Forum - official forum and IRC channels for Laravel.
• Laravel Recipes - useful tips and tutorials.

PHP PaaS Providers

• Forge
• Fortrabbit
• PagodaBox
• Heroku
• Cloudways

Components

Illuminate components which can be found in https://github.com/illuminate

are the smaller parts that make up the Laravel Framework. Several other open-source libraries are used by Laravel, which can be seen in its composer.json file https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/5.0/composer.json#L22-L43

Other Useful Resources

Laracasts

• Laracasts

Starter Kits

• Laravel 5 Boilerplate with Gentelella Admin Theme

Youtube Channels

• Laracon
• Laracon EU
• php[architect]
• phpacademy

Paid Videos

• open for suggestions

Books

• Laravel from Apprentice to Artisan by Taylor Otwell
• Laravel Testing Decoded by Jeffrey Way
• Implementing Laravel by Chris Fidao
• Laravel Application Development Cookbook by Terryu Matula
• Laravel: Code Bright by Dayle Rees
• Laravel 5 Essentials by Martin Bean
• Laravel Books on leanpub

• Laravel: Up and Running by Matt Stauffer

• open for suggestions

Community

• Twitter (@laravelphp)
• Slack (#laravel)
• Reddit (/r/laravel)
• News
• Laravel.io Forums
• Laracasts Forums
• Google+ Community
• Laravel Hunt
• Meetup

User Groups

• Laravel Philippines
• Slack PHackers #LaravelPH
• Laravel Iran
• Laravel India
• Laravel France
• Laravel Myanmar
• Laravel Spain
• Laravel Korea

Conferences

• http://laracon.us
• http://laracon.eu

Credits