Your Daily Source for AI & Tech News

Laravel Basics: A Friendly Introduction for Beginners

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks in the world, known for its elegant syntax, powerful tools, and developer-friendly ecosystem. Whether you’re building a simple website or a large-scale application, Laravel gives you everything you need to work faster and write cleaner, maintainable code.

In this article, we'll walk through the core concepts every beginner should understand before diving deeper into Laravel development.

What Is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source web application framework built on PHP. It follows the MVC (Model–View–Controller) architecture, allowing you to structure your application cleanly.
Laravel focuses on developer happiness by offering features like:

A readable, expressive syntax
Built-in authentication and authorization
Secure routing
Database migrations
An amazing ecosystem (Horizon, Forge, Telescope, etc.)

Laravel helps you avoid “reinventing the wheel” by providing solutions for common web-development tasks.

Installing Laravel

Before installing, make sure you have:

PHP 8.1+
Composer
MySQL or another supported database
Node.js (optional for frontend tooling)

You can create a new Laravel project with:

composer create-project laravel/laravel myapp

Then start the local development server:

php artisan serve

Your app will be available at:

http://localhost:8000

Understanding the Folder Structure

Here are the folders you'll use most often:

Folder	Purpose
app/	Contains your controllers, models, middleware
routes/	Defines project routes (web.php, api.php)
resources/views/	Blade templates (HTML)
database/	Migrations, seeders, factories
public/	Web-accessible files (CSS, JS, images)

This structure helps keep logic organized and easy to maintain.

Routing in Laravel

Routes define how the application responds to URLs.

Example of a simple route:

Route::get('/hello', function () {
return "Hello, World!";
});

Routes can also point to controllers:

Route::get('/users', [UserController::class, 'index']);

Controllers

Controllers group your logic into classes.

You can create one using:

php artisan make:controller UserController

Example controller method:

public function index() { 
	$users = User::all(); 
	return view('users.index', compact('users')); 
}

Models and Eloquent ORM

Laravel’s ORM, Eloquent, allows you to interact with the database using expressive model classes instead of SQL.

Creating a model:

php artisan make:model Post -m

A simple Post model:

class Post extends Model { 
	protected $fillable = ['title', 'content']; 
}

Retrieving posts:

$posts = Post::all();

Blade Templates (Views)

Blade is Laravel’s templating engine, allowing clean and reusable HTML components.

Example Blade file:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>    
       <title>{{ $title }}</title>
  </head>
  <body>    
       <h1>Welcome to Laravel!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Passing data to a view:

return view('home', ['title' => 'Home Page']);

Database Migrations

Migrations help you version-control your database structure.

Example migration file:

public function up() { 
	Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
	 $table->id(); 
	 $table->string('title'); 
	 $table->text('content'); 
	 $table->timestamps();
	}); 
}

Run migrations: