How To Use The Laravel Framework In PHP

How To Use The Laravel Framework In PHP

How To Use The Laravel Framework In PHP

Emmanuel Ighosewe
Author
Emmanuel Ighosewe

Laravel is an MVC framework made for PHP, and it is open-source. Laravel is a powerful framework that allows easy development of PHP web applications, and its features include a modular packaging system with a committed dependency manager, databases access, and other utilities for deploying and maintaining applications.

Taylor Otwell developed Laravel. Since its first release (version 1) in June 2011, it has been steadily growing in PHP frameworks in the web development industry and is gaining more and more popularity. Much of this popularity is due to the myriad of developer-centric features it brings.

Features of Laravel

Authentication Process

This feature allows website owners to quickly step in and enable authentication and authorization, which greatly simplifies authentication.

MVC Architectural Support

The Laravel framework utilizes an MVC architectural pattern to manipulate and handle the development specifics of each embedded application.

This approach improves performance and allows developers to write clean, readable code, contributing to better documentation.

Routing System

In Laravel, the designer can choose the path defined in the application/course / HTTP / PHP file to activate the application and then transfer it to Laravel.

Modularity

Laravel relies on over 20 unique libraries, which are themselves classified as stand-alone modules, allowing application designers to create simple responsive web-based modules.

The route method confirms a URL, and the user must always enter the topic name based on the URL and automatically enter the correct URL.

Lightweight Templates

By integrating dynamic content multiplication, the lightweight templates of Laravel templates create simple and excellent web applications.

In addition, it includes a significant collection of powerfully structured CSS and JSS widgets.

Unit Tests

The test function of the unit ensures that any new changes do not cause problems during the execution of several tests.

Although it takes a long time to develop unit tests, it enables the operation of the application.

Pros of Laravel

If you are an enthusiast of PHP, you'll love Laravel, which is one of the newest technologies and has the following benefits:

  • Laravel is very popular among the web development community, also listed as part of the best PHP frameworks for developing websites.
  • Laravel has an easy learning process, and its documentation is also straightforward, and the PHP screencast also streamlines the process. The Laravel documentation is very good.
  • The framework is an MVC. The traditional architecture where developers are used to writing all HTML and PHP code in one file is avoided.

Solid ORM Support – This service is for automating dynamic nodes and modeling.

Security – Obviously, all applications do not come with 100% security because it largely depends on the way developers create the web application; however, in comparison with other competitors, Laravel has a higher rating when it comes to security.

Cons of Laravel

Compared to Rail and Django, it's lighter and therefore has less built-in help. However, integrating third-party tools can solve this problem, but it might be a daunting task with great custom websites.

The namespace of Laravel contains the main Laravel files. Not all main files use the namespace bar (a\) before calling other main files, which makes some classes a bit complicated. This is definitely not a big issue and should be handled by any designer.

Laravel is not as fast as many other frameworks; the framework is relatively slower because of many built-in features; it is not as fast as CodeIgniter and its smaller Lumen version. Plus, it cannot match the speed of Falcon.

Honestly, it's not suitable for real-time web apps; it doesn't only apply to Laravel, but there are no PHP frameworks that are good for real-time communication, and there are different alternatives like Node, Go, Erlang that is well suitable for developing web applications.

Laravel Installations

Laravel uses a composer to manage its dependencies. Therefore, before using Laravel, you need to check if you have a Composer installed in your system or not.

If there is no Composer on your computer, then go to the URL below to download Composer:

https://getcomposer.org/download/

When you have finished downloading the Composer, check if it is installed by entering the Composer command at the command prompt.

You need to consider adding the entire Composer system provider to the $PATH bin directory; because of this, your system may detect the Laravel executable. It depends on your current operating system; this directory will be there. However, for computers with operating systems such as MAC and Linux, the following are:

macOS: $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin

Linux OS: $HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin

Setup Laravel Using an Installer

Before anything, there has to be the Laravel installer available on your system, and you can get this using the Composer using the prompt below:

composer global requires "laravel/installer."

After you are through with the installation, there will be a commencement of new installation in the provided directory through the Laravel new command.

laravel new nirectory_name

Create a Project

Then you need to create a new folder in a path on your system to save your Laravel project. Switch to where the directory is created. To install Laravel, you need to enter the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel - prefer -dist

The above-mentioned command will install Laravel on that particular directory. Then, enter the next command:

PHP artisan serve

The code above will start the service of Laravel. A black screen will come up displaying the message: Laravel Development server started on http://localhost:8080.

Copy and paste: http://localhost: 8080 in your browser, and the home screen of the Laravel would appear in your browser.




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