Build an API with Laravel 5

I'll be working alongside this tutorial for building the API. The author put the source code up for it here

###Step 1: Create the project

We can use this handy script for generating a new Laravel 5 app.

I also wrote this Medium article that goes through installing and configuring a MySQL database for a Laravel 5 application. I find myself refering back to it regularly.

If you don't have MySQL installed on Mac may the force be with you. It comes preinstalled and there's MAMP but getting your machine set up to run SQL to MySQL from the terminal can be tricky.

My setup is to run:

$ mysql -uroot -p > create database MY_APP_NAME; $ php artisan make:model Article -m 

The ; is required in order to end all SQL statements.

Add a title and body string columns to the articles database and run the migrations:

$ php artisan migrate 

If you get an error saying cannot connect to homestead, even after you updated your .env to not point to homestead anymore clear the config and try again.

To clear config in Laravel:

$ php artisan config:clear 

Make the models fillable (Laravel will protect them by default). Add this line to app/Article.php:

protected $fillable = ['title', 'body']; 

Fillable will allow reads and writes to those database columns. You could also set a guarded property to an empty array:

$guarded = [] 

Which for our purposes will do the same thing. To learn more about this you can check the Eloquent docs on Mass Assignment.

By default we want data to play with so we must seed the database. Generate a new seeder for creating articles:

Create the articles table seeder:

$ php artisan make:seeder ArticlesTableSeeder 

That file is in database/seeds/ArticlesTableSeeder.php. Update it so it looks like:

<?php use App\Article; use Illuminate\Database\Seeder; class ArticlesTableSeeder extends Seeder { public function run() { // Let's truncate our existing records to start from scratch. Article::truncate(); $faker = \Faker\Factory::create(); // And now, let's create a few articles in our database: for ($i = 0; $i < 50; $i++) { Article::create([ 'title' => $faker->sentence, 'body' => $faker->paragraph, ]); } } } 

Run the database seeder:

$ php artisan db:seed --class=ArticlesTableSeeder 

To make sure it worked we can use the artisan tinker command. For the uninitiated there's a great intro article about the tool on scotch.io.

To use it we run:

$ php artisan tinker > App\Article::all(); 

Fifty articles in JSON format should fill up your console screen. Congrats we seeded the database full of articles!