Laravel Introduction
Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework for building modern web applications.
Laravel is the most popular PHP framework for building web applications. It gives you an expressive, elegant syntax and a huge toolbox of features so you can focus on your app instead of boilerplate.
What Laravel gives you
- Routing — map URLs to code.
- Eloquent ORM — work with your database using PHP objects.
- Blade — a clean templating engine.
- Helpers & Collections — convenient tools for arrays, strings and dates.
Many of Laravel's helper tools are just PHP functions and classes you can run on their own. This tutorial focuses first on those runnable helpers, then shows how the full framework fits together.
Example
When to use it
- A startup builds its SaaS product using Laravel because it ships with authentication, queues, and an ORM out of the box, cutting development time in half.
- An agency standardises all client projects on Laravel so every developer on the team already knows the folder structure and Artisan conventions.
- A developer migrates a legacy PHP codebase to Laravel to gain built-in security features like CSRF protection, password hashing, and SQL-injection-safe query building.
More examples
Create a new Laravel project
Scaffolds a fresh Laravel application and starts the built-in development server on http://localhost:8000.
composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app
cd my-app
php artisan serveDefine a basic route and return JSON
Registers a GET route that returns a JSON response, illustrating Laravel's expressive routing and response helpers.
// routes/web.php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
Route::get('/status', function () {
return response()->json(['status' => 'ok', 'framework' => 'Laravel']);
});Read an environment variable safely
Shows how Laravel reads .env values via env() in config files and how application code should always read config() rather than env() directly.
// config/app.php
'name' => env('APP_NAME', 'My Laravel App'),
// Anywhere in application code
$appName = config('app.name');
$debug = config('app.debug');
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