A Beginner’s Guide to Laravel: Essential Codes, Installation, and More

3 min readJul 6, 2023

Laravel is a powerful PHP framework that allows developers to build robust and feature-rich web applications. If you’re new to Laravel, this guide will walk you through the fundamental concepts, installation process, and provide example codes to help you get started on the right track. Let’s dive in!

1- Installing Laravel:

• Before getting started, ensure that PHP 7.3 or higher is installed on your system. You’ll also need to install Composer, a dependency manager for PHP.

• Open your terminal and run the following command to install Laravel globally:

composer global require laravel/installer

• Once the installation is complete, create a new Laravel project by running the command:

laravel new project-name

• After the project is created, navigate to the project’s root directory and use the command php artisan serve to run the project on your local server.

2. Basic Routing:

• Routes in Laravel allow you to map URLs to appropriate actions within your application.

• Routes can be defined in the routes/web.php file. For example:

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
});

• In the above example, a GET request to the root URL (’/’) will return the ‘welcome’ view.

3. Creating Controllers:

• Controllers in Laravel handle the business logic and process the routes.

• To create a controller, use the command php artisan make:controller ControllerName in your terminal.

• Here’s an example of a HomeController:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class HomeController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return view('welcome');
    }
}

• In the above example, we create a HomeController that has an index method returning the ‘welcome’ view.

4. Creating Views:

• Views in Laravel represent the HTML templates presented to users.

• Views are stored in the resources/views directory.

• For example, create a file named welcome.blade.php and add the HTML template:

<html>
<head>
    <title>Welcome</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello, Laravel!</h1>
</body>
</html>

5. Models and Database Operations:

• Laravel utilizes the Eloquent ORM for database operations.

• To create a model, use the command php artisan make:model ModelName.

• The created model is associated with a database table. For instance, in the User model:

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class User extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'users'; // The table associated with the model
}

• To perform database operations with the model, you can use Eloquent ORM. For example:

$user = User::find(1); // Find a user with ID 1
echo $user->name; // Output the user's name

6. Form Handling:

• Laravel provides convenient functions to handle form data.

• For example, to submit a form and process the data, you can use the following code in your HTML form:

<form method="POST" action="/form-submit">
    @csrf <!-- CSRF token for protection -->
    <input type="text" name="username">
    <input type="password" name="password">
    <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

Then, define the route to which the form will be submitted in the routes/web.php file:

Route::post('/form-submit', 'FormController@submit');

• Create a FormController that will handle the form data and define the submit method:

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class FormController extends Controller
{
    public function submit(Request $request)
    {
        $username = $request->input('username');
        $password = $request->input('password');
        // Process the data...
    }
}

By following these fundamental concepts and example codes, you’ll gain a solid understanding of Laravel.

Remember, practice is key to mastering any framework.

Happy coding!

A Beginner’s Guide to Laravel: Essential Codes, Installation, and More

Written by İbrahim Halil Oğlakcı