The Laravel Guide

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework, and one of the most productive ways to build a full web application today.

It gives you everything out of the box: routing, database access, authentication, templating, queues, CLI tooling. The conventions are strong and the documentation is excellent. You spend your time building features, not wiring infrastructure.

I wrote a series of tutorials that takes you from zero to a working, deployed Laravel application. This page organizes them into a learning path.

If you’re new to PHP itself, start with the PHP guide first, then come back here.

Where to start

Follow these in order. They build on each other:

• Introduction to Laravel covers what Laravel is and how to set up your first project
• How to use Blade templates in Laravel for rendering your pages
• Connecting a database to Laravel
• Laravel migrations: create and modify a database schema
• Dynamic routes in Laravel to handle URLs with parameters
• Store form input in the database with Laravel

At this point you have a working app that accepts user input and stores it. That’s the core loop of most web applications.

Authentication

Most real apps need users to log in. Laravel makes this surprisingly easy with Breeze:

• Setting up authentication using Laravel Breeze
• Only authenticated users can add items to the database puts it into practice

Styling and tooling

Two posts to round out the developer experience:

• Using Tailwind CSS with Laravel for styling your views
• Creating CLI commands in Laravel with Artisan

Deployment

When your app is ready, ship it:

• Deploying a site to Laravel Forge covers the whole process
• Fix Cloudflare ‘too many redirects’ on Laravel Forge SSL solves a common gotcha if you use Cloudflare in front of Forge

Go deeper

I collected all of this in the free Laravel Handbook. It walks through building a complete application from scratch, and you can download it as PDF or EPUB.

All posts on this topic are in the Laravel tag archive.

Related posts about laravel: