What is Laravel ?

By Georgi Genov
 About me

• Georgi Genov - 25 years old

• Programming since 7 years
• I wrote my first code when I was 15 years old
• Graduated Mathematical School in Pazardzhik and then
Technical University of Sofia, Automation engineer

www.ggenov.eu • Currently working as Team Leader in software company and

Freelancer, so I can be up to date with the latest technologies
ggenov
 We will learn today …
• What is Laravel ?
• Install Laravel 5 with Composer
• Files structure
• What is artisan and how does it save us time?
• Routing and route types
• What is Middleware and how to use it?
• What is Blade ?
• Database and Eloquent ORM
• CRUD with validation and database connection
(practical task)
• Best practices when coding in Laravel
 What is ?

• Laravel is MVC PHP framework created by Taylor Otwell in 2011

• Free open-source license with many contributors worldwide
• One of the best frameworks together with Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii
• Has powerful features, saving us time
• Uses Symfony packages
• Lets see some statistics
Google Trends (2012 – 2017)
PHP Framework Popularity at Work – SitePoint 2015
 Features
• Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) – implements ActiveRecord
• Query builder – helps you to build secured SQL queries
• Restful controllers – provides a way for separating the different HTTP
requests (GET, POST, DELETE, etc.)
• Blade template engine – combines templates with a data model to produce
views
• Migrations – version control system for database, update your database easier
• Database seeding – provides a way to populate database tables with test data
used for testing
• Pagination – easy to use advanced pagination functionalities
• Forms security – provides CSRF token middleware, protecting all the forms
 Must have packages
• Laravel debugbar - https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-debugbar
Great for debugging on local environment. Shows all the views, requests, exceptions
loaded for the current page.

• LaravelCollective – Forms & HTML - https://laravelcollective.com/docs/master/html

Perfect for generating forms, inputs, script tags and style tags

• Laravel IDE Helper - https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper

The package helps your IDE with autocomplete and autosuggest methods, views,
functions and more.
 Let’s install Laravel

• Laravel uses Composer to manage its dependencies

• Composer is dependency management tool for PHP, like a
library full of books
• NOT like Yum or apt
• Per project tool (vendor folder), not per system
• Install by using the command:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel
laravel-softuni
 The structure

app/Http folder contains the Controllers,

Middlewares and Kernel file

All the models should be located in app/Models

folder

The service providers that are bootstrapping

functions in our app are located in
app/Providers folder

All the config files are located in app/config

folder
 Database folder contains the
migrations and seeds

The public folder is the actual folder you are

opening on the web server.
All JS / CSS / Images / Uploads are located there.

The resources folder contains all the

translations, views and assets (SASS, LESS, JS)
that are compiled into public folder

The routes folder contains all the routes for the

project

All the logs / cache files are located in storage

folder

The vendor folder contains all the composer

packages (dependencies)
 Artisan !

• Artisan is command-line interface for Laravel

• Commands that are saving time
• Generating files with artisan is recommended
• Run php artisan list in the console
 Routing
• The best and easy routing system I’ve seen
• Routing per middleware / prefix or namespace
• Routing per request method (GET, POST, DELETE, etc.)
• ALWAYS name your route !
• Be careful with the routing order !
• Let’s see routing examples
 Middleware
• The middleware is mechanism for
filtering the HTTP requests
• Laravel includes several middlewares –
Authentication, CSRF Protection
• The auth middleware checks if the user
visting the page is authenticated
through session cookie
• The CSRF token protection middleware
protects your application from cross-site
request forgery attacks by adding token
key for each generated form
• Let’s create middleware
 Blade

• Blade is the powerful template engine provided by Laravel

• All the code inside blade file is compiled to static html file
• Supports plain PHP
• Saves time
• Better components mobility, extend and include partials
• Let’s take a look at few examples
 Eloquent & Database
• The Eloquent ORM (Object-relational mapping) provides simple ActiveRecord implementation
for working with the database

$article = new Article();

$article->title = ‘Article title’;
$article->description = ‘Description’;
$article->save();

INSERT INTO `article` (`title`, `description`) VALUES (‘Article title’, ‘Description’);

• Each table has its own “Model”. You can use the model to read, insert, update or delete row
from the specific table
• Let’s check one model
 Practical task
We will play with Laravel and create CRUD for recipes (Create, Read, Update, Delete).

The recipe will have the following columns / fields :

• Id – primary key – not null
• Title – varchar – 255 length – not null
• Description – text – nullable
• Status – enum [ active / inactive ] – not null – defaults to active
• Created At – datetime – not null
• Updated At – datetime – not null
 Best practices in Laravel

NEVER write queries or model logic inside the controller! The controller
job is to communicate with the model and pass data to the view.
 Views mobility

Extend and include partials. For example share the

same form fields on 2 pages – add and edit
 Forms security

Always use the CSRF token protection that Laravel provides in forms you create, the hackers will
not be able to spam your forms and database
 Database architecture

Be careful with the database architecture, always use the proper length for specific column and
never forget the indexes for searchable columns
 Big query

• Avoid the big query unless you

really have to do it. The big query
is hard to debug and understand.
• You can merge the small queries
into one to save the CPU time on
server, but sometimes the query
becomes way too big.
 Don’t forget the PHPDoc

Don’t forget to write comments for each method or complicated logic. The PHPDoc comments
are helping the IDE to autosuggest easier and the developers to understand the piece of code
Thank you! Questions ?