Laravel 11 was upgraded/released in 2024, has been continuing to evolve as a powerful PHP framework for web app and PWAs. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up and using Laravel 11 effectively to make the most of this powerful framerwork which has made our lives easier being developers. It keeps providing us amazing and powerful tools for building modern web apps. As you have been working with Laravel 11, you will discover its many features that streamline the development process. Remember to consult the official Laravel documentation for more detailed information on specific features and best practices
To begin with Laravel 11, you will need to have PHP 8.2 or higher installed on your system. You can install Laravel using Composer, the PHP package manager. Open your terminal and run:
composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name
This command will create a new Laravel 11 project in a directory named ‘your-project-name’.
After installation, you will be configuring your apps. The ‘.env‘ file in your project root contains important configuration settings. You should be updating this file with your database credentials and other environment-specific settings. Laravel 11 supports various databases. To set up your database, edit the ‘.env‘ file and update the DB_* variables with your database information. Then, run migrations to create the necessary tables
php artisan migrate
In Laravel 11, routes are defined in the ‘routes/web.php’ file for web routes and ‘routes/api.php‘ for API routes. Here is an example of a basic route
Route::get(‘/welcome’, function () {
return view(‘welcome’);
});
We would use Controllers to handle the logic of your application. To create a controller, use the artisan command
php artisan make:controller YourControllerName
We would use the models to represent our database tables. To create a model, we would use
php artisan make:model YourModelName
So, you should see that Views are the presentation layer of your application. Laravel 11 uses Blade as its templating engine. Create your views in the ‘resources/views’ directory with a ‘.blade.php’ extension. Laravel’s Eloquent ORM provides an intuitive way to interact with your database. Here is an example of retrieving all records from a table
$users = User::all();
Next comes Middleware which would provide a mechanism for filtering HTTP requests entering your app. You can create middleware using
php artisan make:middleware YourMiddlewareName
Laravel 11 includes built-in authentication features. You can set up authentication scaffolding using
php artisan make:auth
Next comes the testing, so Laravel provides a convenient way to write and run tests. You can create a test using
php artisan make:test YourTestName
When you are ready to deploy your Laravel 11 application, ensure that you have optimized it for production. Run the following commands
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache
Now just use it for building amazing technologies and web apps. This upgrade would certainly add a new layer to your experience as a developer.
