Build Simple REST API with Laravel

3 min readJan 14, 2022

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural method of communication that uses HTTP protocol for data exchange. Application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. In short, API can make other applications, whether it’s a mobile apps or something else, can communicate with our application.

In this post I want to share how to create a REST API in Laravel with very simple way.

First create a new project or you can skip this if you already have one.

composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-api --prefer-dist

Set up your database connection in the .env and then create migration for some table, in this I will use posts table as an example.

php artisan make:migration create_posts_table

In the posts migration file :

<?phpuse Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;class CreatePostsTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
     public function up()
     {
         Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
             $table->id();
             $table->string('title');
             $table->string('slug');
             $table->string('body');
             $table->timestamps();
        });
     }    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
     public function down()
     {
         Schema::dropIfExists('posts');
     }}

Run migrate with php artisan migrate command.

Create some models and controllers

php artisan model Post -c

Write all, show, store, update and destroy function in the controller, in the PostController will be something like this :

Add guarded or fillable property into Post model, because in the controller we use mass assignment.

protected $guarded = ['id'];

Modify the routes in api.php

use App\Http\Controllers\PostController;Route::group(['prefix'=>'post'], function () {
        Route::get('/', [PostController::class, 'index']);
        Route::get('/{id}', [PostController::class, 'show']);
        Route::post('/', [PostController::class, 'store']);
        Route::put('/{id}', [PostController::class, 'update']);
        Route::delete('/{id}', [PostController::class, 'destroy']);
});

Test
We need application like postman or insomnia or something else for testing purpose. You can download postman from this link.