Getting Started

Introduction

Hello, welcome to this tutorial on building a RESTful service using Laravel. My name is Adarsh Maurya. I worked a lot with Laravel, creating both traditional server-side applications, as well as RESTful services. Speaking of that, the way the web works, or better said, is used, changed a lot during the last years or the last 10 years maybe. Where we used to create server-side only applications in the past, which would render a view to the browser to render, nowadays it's more and more common to create services, RESTful services for example, which expose some API endpoints for other clients like smartphone apps or web clients, to consume. Therefore, this tutorial tries to fill the gap between traditional Laravel tutorials introducing the basics on Laravel, and sticking to the server-side only paradigm, and the theory of creating a RESTful service with any server-side language. More specifically, I recommend having a look at this play-by-play-laravel-5-getting-started to grasp the basics of the Laravel language, as I will repeat the important things used in this tutorial, but it's no Laravel beginner tutorial, and I won't dive in depth into Laravel. I also recommend having a look at this REST Fundamentals tutorial by Howard Dierking, which looks at RESTful services in theory and without having a specific server-side language in mind. Lastly, you might come from a tutorial like this one, RESTful Web Services with Node.js and Express by Jonathan Mills here, and I try to, well, basically achieve the same, but of course with Laravel on the server side.

Tutorial Structure

Let me give you an overview over this tutorial in general, and this chapter here specifically. So I will start by explaining what this tutorial will actually teach you, before I dive into RESTful services and give a refresher on them, as well as on Laravel, or at least on setting up Laravel. I already showed the tutorials I recommend for gaining the basic understanding of Laravel and RESTful services, since that won't be covered here in depth. So what will this tutorial actually teach you? Well, we'll begin with this short introduction here, where I provide some refreshers. Thereafter in the next chapter, I'll explain how to design and structure a RESTful service, which of course is very important no matter which server-side language you choose. Thereafter, it's time to work with Laravel and set up routing to provide appropriate API endpoints for the service. And all this will be accompanied with a demo, which I will also show in this chapter here so that you have a clue of what we will be building throughout this tutorial. After routing, it's time to have a look at requests and responses, and how both can be handled by Laravel before we dive into CRUD operations, so how to add a database on the server to actually store, manipulate, and handle data. Lastly, a very important topic, authentication. of course you want to make sure that any RESTful service you build is secure, and enables users to log in and authenticate themselves, therefore this chapter will cover how you can do this.

What are RESTful Services?

So let's start with thinking about what RESTful services actually are. Have a look at this slide. You see we have two clients, a laptop and a smartphone, and we have three applications you probably all know, Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter. The question is what's the common ground here? Well, all these applications can be accessed from different devices. Neither Google Maps, nor Facebook or Twitter are only accessible via browser on your notebook or a smartphone app. All these services are exposed to different devices. Now as you are probably also aware, all these services live from the data they store in the internet or they can fetch from servers, so the solution certainly is not to build standalone apps for each device. Instead, what is used here is a RESTful API, or some sort of API to which the different devices, or applications running on those devices, can reach out in order to fetch data, or store data, or do whatever they have to do. This underlines the importance of such APIs, and why it's a good thing to know how to build something like that. This tutorial specifically is about RESTful services, which according to this definition_** provides a uniform, standardized access with clear request requirements and response structure**_. This of course means that RESTful services allow us to know which data they will receive so that the server is able to handle this data, and that they provide a clear and standardized response, which can be handled by different applications accessing the service, like for example an app on a smartphone.

Demo Overview

Before starting with the theory, or the refreshers on Laravel or RESTful services, let's have a little demo to see what we're actually building throughout this tutorial, and what RESTful services are and how they work. In this demo you'll see :how you can easily access and test APIs with Postman, a nice little tool you'll learn to use in a second, how to find a location with the Google Maps, or location API, just as an example for such a RESTful service. Hopefully, you'll be able to understand the result you get back, and in the end you'll see what we'll actually build throughout this tutorial, so our own RESTful API.

Postman Setup & Demo

The first step is to get Postman. Now Postman is a little program, or a Chrome extension to be precise, which allows you to access RESTful APIs in a very convenient way, with a graphical user interface and an easy way to send data and see response data. As you see on this web page, getpostman.com, you can easily click on Chrome App in order to be taken to the Chrome extension manager here, and in my case I already got it, and yes this is in German, but you would just click here to install this app in your Chrome browser. Now if you're on a Mac you will also have the option of downloading the Mac app, but on Windows make sure to install Chrome at this application, this extension here. Once Postman is installed and you launch it, you should see something like this. This is the interface with which we will work a lot throughout this tutorial, and which allows you to send requests to RESTful APIs. It looks a bit like a browser with different tabs here, and this bar to enter a URL. Notice that you have this drop-down on the left of this bar, which allows you to specify different types of HTTP requests you want to send, and this will become important throughout this tutorial where we will not only send Get requests, but also Post, Put, Patch, and much more. Below this bar you get a possibility to specify some headers you want to send with a request, or if appropriate for example, the Post request calls a body, so some data. You can there choose raw data to basically, for example, send JSON formatted data by simply typing it here. Back to the Headers, what I want to do first is I want to set the Content-Type header, and I will set it to application/json. Next I want to access the Google location API to have an example for such a RESTful service, and I will set my request type back to Get. Now the URL I'm going to use is the following, I'll request it via https, then maps.googleapis.com/maps/api, then geocode/json?, and then address=. Now here you may enter the address you want to look up. Let's say it's New York, then you would enter New, and then %20York, the percentage sign 20 of course represents a whitespace, and then with a Get parameter selected here, click Send.

GET https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=New%20York City&key=xxx

Now what you should see is this result here, and you can switch between different ways of displaying it, for example Preview to have it render like an HTML page, not very readable, Raw to have the raw format received, or Pretty, which also has some highlighting here going on. As you can see what we get back is JSON-formatted data, where we have all our results with New York City here, and so on. And you can of course try this out for various locations you want to try out here. So we got this JSON formatted data back just by sending this request to Google's RESTful service here, and this is what a RESTful service typically does, it takes your request and returns you some data. Now, RESTful services, which also takes Post requests, of course, also can be sent data, again by switching this to Post, and then specifying the data here, make sure you click on raw or JSON here, and then just enter your JSON string. This is how you use Postman, but here you also saw how to access such a RESTful API, at the example of Google's location API. You also see which data we get returned, and once all that is great, let's see what we're actually building in this tutorial.

Demo: Tutorial Project

So here's what we're going to build, a RESTful service, which allows you to sign up as a user, and then create meetings, sign up for meetings, and register for meetings, delete meetings, or change meetings. So a little organizer-like application. Here, I'm on the route of creating a new user, and make sure that later on in this tutorial when you try this on your own application we're building throughout this tutorial, to change the URL you see here to the URL pointing to your RESTful server, or to your server hosting this application. Now here I'm trying to create a new user, which is why I have the Post method selected here. And also, later in this tutorial, make sure to provide one extra header. Besides the Content-Type, which is application/json, make sure to provide the X-Requested-With header with a value of XMLHttpRequest. This is required by Laravel to handle your requests correctly, especially when it comes to things like validation and returning errors. Here for creating a new user I pass a Post body, so a JSON object where I pass the name of the user I want to create, and email, and a password. Now if I click Send,

Create User:

POST http://laravel-rest.dev/api/v1/user

you see that I also get a JSON response where, well, I'm told that the user was created. I can then use this user to sign in on this route, and pass in the credentials I just created, which returns me a JSON token, which is the security mechanism used in this tutorial.

Signin User:

GET http://laravel-rest.dev/api/v1/user/signin

And of course you will learn more about this in the last chapter. And with that I'm for example, able to create a new meeting by passing the token with the request, passing some meeting data like the time when I want this meeting to happen, a name, and a description. I'm going to click Send here;

Generate Meeting

POST http://laravel-rest.dev/api/v1/meeting?token=xxx

this actually creates such a new meeting. Now I'm not going to go through all these routes here, but I think you get the idea of what this application does, and how it works. And I'm very excited to get started with that, and start building this together with you in the next chapters.

Refresher on RESTful Services

So now that you saw some RESTful services in action, and what we're actually going to build throughout this tutorial, let's have a look at the structure a RESTful service generally has, or how it works.

Here we have, well, parts of a RESTful service. We've got some API endpoints, and we want to reach them with different devices or applications on different devices, different kinds of applications. Well, of course we have our routes to these endpoints, but in the end it's our RESTful service in the middle, which takes the requests sent by the devices and handles them appropriately with the API endpoints set up.

This RESTful service has some principles, or in general RESTful services have some principles, and you'll also see services, which kind of work in the same way, but don't follow these principles.

Now, theoretically they aren't real RESTful services even though the border of course is a bit fluent. But, in theory the following principles are defined for RESTful services.

It should have a uniform interface, which means the resources are defined by URLs, a client sends a representation of data, for example JSON, and the HTTP protocol is used for sending the data or request.

The RESTful service also is stateless, and this is very important, you will see this in the authentication chapter. The serving stateless means that no client information is stored on a server, and you shouldn't ever do this when creating a RESTful service. All required information has to be contained in a request. This means the server doesn't care if it's the same application sending the third request, or another one sending it's first, for the RESTful service each request is seen individually.

RESTful services also can be cacheable, which means that if the RESTful service sends the appropriate response, clients may cache certain data.

Additionally we have a clear client and server separation going on, which means you shouldn't run a web application reaching out to a RESTful service on the same server as the service runs.

We also have a layered system, which means that the client can't tell if he's connected to the end server or any intermediate server.

And lastly, and this is an optional constraint, we have code on demand. This means that the service, the RESTful service, may send code to the client, which the client then can execute.

Now these are the constraints defined for RESTful services, and when creating such a service you should try to follow them, otherwise it's not really a RESTful service which you're creating. So this has been the short refresher on RESTful services.

Refresher on Laravel & Setting Laravel Up

Time to continue with Laravel, which according to its own definition is the PHP framework for web artisans.

Now what is Laravel? It's a comprehensive MVC, so Model View Controller framework, which offers us a lot of chapters, and things of which we can choose the ones we need for our project like

Model & Database Access Request & Response Flow Validation Helpers & Facades View & Templating Engine(Blade) Middleware Session Management Extendable Controller Routing Authentication Much More...

It uses models and makes database access very simple, something we will use throughout this tutorial. It also has a lot of other things, as you can see here, and of course I'm not going through them all. You also won't need all of these topics here for a RESTful service, for example Views or Session Management aren't important here, but it is certainly important for you to have a solid understanding of how Laravel works and about Laravel fundamentals. And therefore, if you're in doubt if you're deep enough into Laravel, check out the tutorial I was mentioning before, or consult the official documentation in case of any doubt. What I want to refresh here, or what I want to make sure, is that the installation of Laravel works fine, and that you're starting with the same project I'm starting here in my demo throughout this tutorial.

Of course there are different ways to set up Laravel. You can set it up on your local machine using a stack like MAMP or XAMPP, or you could use a virtual machine like Vagrant especially with the Homestead box. This is, by the way, the approach I'll be using throughout this tutorial, but you of course are able to follow along with any other approach. Just make sure to set it up correctly, and know how to navigate to your RESTful service app. Lastly, you might also choose a cloud workspace, or IDE, on which you can host and develop your project. No matter what your stack or your environment is, the setup process is always the same. You may of course also have a look at the official documentation to learn more about that, but generally here are the steps necessary to install or set up a new Laravel project, and these are the steps I'll demonstrate in a second.

Setup Process

Fetch composer from getcomposer.org

It's important to get Composer from getcomposer.org Now Composer is simply a PHP package manager, which makes installing Laravel and other dependencies of Laravel, really, really easy. And I'll use Composer throughout this tutorial, not only to set up Laravel, but also later in the authentication section to install a third-party package.

Create Laravel project with composer

Once Composer was fetched and installed on your machine, you may simple create a new project with Composer, like this, by running composer create-project laravel/laravel project folder you want to create for this project. Lastly, it's very important to configure your .env file inside this newly created Laravel installation.

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

Here you have to set up the connection to your database, and this of course depends on your development environment. Just make sure that this is correct, otherwise you will run into problems, and probably not be able to replicate the results I'm getting here in the tutorial.

Demo: Tutorial Project Setup

So let me go through the installation process here step by step. I'm on getcomposer.org, and I've already got it on my machine, but if you don't, click on Download and make sure to follow these steps to actually install Composer on your machine.

Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '93b54496392c062774670ac18b134c3b3a95e5a5e5c8f1a9f115f203b75bf9a129d5daa8ba6a13e2cc8a1da0806388a8') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
Installer verified
Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ php composer-setup.php
All settings correct for using Composer
Downloading...

Composer (version 1.7.3) successfully installed to: /Users/adarshmaurya/Playground/play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started/composer.phar
Use it: php composer.phar

Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

The next step is to go into the terminal, or command-line tool, and there navigate into the folder where you want to create this project. Of course this should be inside your development environment. As you can see here I'm using Vagrant, but as I already said, use whatever you like. Inside the folder where you want to create your new project folder, run composer create-project laravel/laravel laravel-rest here.

Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ ./composer.phar create-project laravel/laravel laravel-rest
`Installing laravel/laravel (v5.7.15)`
  - Installing laravel/laravel (v5.7.15): Loading from cache
Created project in laravel-rest
> @php -r "file_exists('.env') || copy('.env.example', '.env');"
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Package operations: 73 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals
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symfony/var-dumper suggests installing ext-intl (To show region name in time zone dump)
symfony/routing suggests installing doctrine/annotations (For using the annotation loader)
symfony/routing suggests installing symfony/config (For using the all-in-one router or any loader)
symfony/routing suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection (For loading routes from a service)
symfony/routing suggests installing symfony/expression-language (For using expression matching)
symfony/routing suggests installing symfony/yaml (For using the YAML loader)
symfony/contracts suggests installing psr/cache (When using the Cache contracts)
symfony/contracts suggests installing symfony/cache-contracts-implementation
symfony/contracts suggests installing symfony/service-contracts-implementation
symfony/event-dispatcher suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/browser-kit
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/config
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection
symfony/console suggests installing symfony/lock
egulias/email-validator suggests installing ext-intl (PHP Internationalization Libraries are required to use the SpoofChecking validation)
swiftmailer/swiftmailer suggests installing ext-intl (Needed to support internationalized email addresses)
swiftmailer/swiftmailer suggests installing true/punycode (Needed to support internationalized email addresses, if ext-intl is not installed)
paragonie/random_compat suggests installing ext-libsodium (Provides a modern crypto API that can be used to generate random bytes.)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing ircmaxell/random-lib (Provides RandomLib for use with the RandomLibAdapter)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing ext-libsodium (Provides the PECL libsodium extension for use with the SodiumRandomGenerator)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing ext-uuid (Provides the PECL UUID extension for use with the PeclUuidTimeGenerator and PeclUuidRandomGenerator)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing moontoast/math (Provides support for converting UUID to 128-bit integer (in string form).)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing ramsey/uuid-doctrine (Allows the use of Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid as Doctrine field type.)
ramsey/uuid suggests installing ramsey/uuid-console (A console application for generating UUIDs with ramsey/uuid)
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/config
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/yaml
nesbot/carbon suggests installing friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer (Needed for the `composer phpcs` command. Allow to automatically fix code style.)
nesbot/carbon suggests installing phpstan/phpstan (Needed for the `composer phpstan` command. Allow to detect potential errors.)
monolog/monolog suggests installing aws/aws-sdk-php (Allow sending log messages to AWS services like DynamoDB)
monolog/monolog suggests installing doctrine/couchdb (Allow sending log messages to a CouchDB server)
monolog/monolog suggests installing ext-amqp (Allow sending log messages to an AMQP server (1.0+ required))
monolog/monolog suggests installing ext-mongo (Allow sending log messages to a MongoDB server)
monolog/monolog suggests installing graylog2/gelf-php (Allow sending log messages to a GrayLog2 server)
monolog/monolog suggests installing mongodb/mongodb (Allow sending log messages to a MongoDB server via PHP Driver)
monolog/monolog suggests installing php-amqplib/php-amqplib (Allow sending log messages to an AMQP server using php-amqplib)
monolog/monolog suggests installing php-console/php-console (Allow sending log messages to Google Chrome)
monolog/monolog suggests installing rollbar/rollbar (Allow sending log messages to Rollbar)
monolog/monolog suggests installing ruflin/elastica (Allow sending log messages to an Elastic Search server)
monolog/monolog suggests installing sentry/sentry (Allow sending log messages to a Sentry server)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-aws-s3-v2 (Allows you to use S3 storage with AWS SDK v2)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 (Allows you to use S3 storage with AWS SDK v3)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-azure (Allows you to use Windows Azure Blob storage)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-cached-adapter (Flysystem adapter decorator for metadata caching)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-eventable-filesystem (Allows you to use EventableFilesystem)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-rackspace (Allows you to use Rackspace Cloud Files)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-sftp (Allows you to use SFTP server storage via phpseclib)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-webdav (Allows you to use WebDAV storage)
league/flysystem suggests installing league/flysystem-ziparchive (Allows you to use ZipArchive adapter)
league/flysystem suggests installing spatie/flysystem-dropbox (Allows you to use Dropbox storage)
league/flysystem suggests installing srmklive/flysystem-dropbox-v2 (Allows you to use Dropbox storage for PHP 5 applications)
laravel/framework suggests installing aws/aws-sdk-php (Required to use the SQS queue driver and SES mail driver (^3.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing doctrine/dbal (Required to rename columns and drop SQLite columns (^2.6).)
laravel/framework suggests installing guzzlehttp/guzzle (Required to use the Mailgun and Mandrill mail drivers and the ping methods on schedules (^6.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 (Required to use the Flysystem S3 driver (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing league/flysystem-cached-adapter (Required to use the Flysystem cache (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing league/flysystem-rackspace (Required to use the Flysystem Rackspace driver (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing league/flysystem-sftp (Required to use the Flysystem SFTP driver (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing moontoast/math (Required to use ordered UUIDs (^1.1).)
laravel/framework suggests installing nexmo/client (Required to use the Nexmo transport (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing pda/pheanstalk (Required to use the beanstalk queue driver (^3.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing predis/predis (Required to use the redis cache and queue drivers (^1.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing pusher/pusher-php-server (Required to use the Pusher broadcast driver (^3.0).)
laravel/framework suggests installing symfony/dom-crawler (Required to use most of the crawler integration testing tools (^4.1).)
laravel/framework suggests installing symfony/psr-http-message-bridge (Required to psr7 bridging features (^1.0).)
psy/psysh suggests installing ext-readline (Enables support for arrow-key history navigation, and showing and manipulating command history.)
psy/psysh suggests installing ext-pdo-sqlite (The doc command requires SQLite to work.)
psy/psysh suggests installing hoa/console (A pure PHP readline implementation. You'll want this if your PHP install doesn't already support readline or libedit.)
filp/whoops suggests installing whoops/soap (Formats errors as SOAP responses)
sebastian/global-state suggests installing ext-uopz (*)
phpunit/php-code-coverage suggests installing ext-xdebug (^2.6.0)
phpunit/phpunit suggests installing phpunit/php-invoker (^2.0)
phpunit/phpunit suggests installing ext-xdebug (*)
Writing lock file
Generating optimized autoload files
> Illuminate\Foundation\ComposerScripts::postAutoloadDump
> @php artisan package:discover --ansi
Discovered Package: beyondcode/laravel-dump-server
Discovered Package: fideloper/proxy
Discovered Package: laravel/tinker
Discovered Package: nesbot/carbon
Discovered Package: nunomaduro/collision
Package manifest generated successfully.
> @php artisan key:generate --ansi
Application key set successfully.        

Now this will start the installation and setup, and this will take quite some time, it will pull down Laravel, and then all the dependences in the next step. I'll be back once this has finished here. So my installation just finished, and be aware that, as you can see here, I'm using Laravel version 5.7.15. I just wanted to highlight this so what you are aware which version I used.

Cross-origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

Now here's one thing I want to point out. Throughout this tutorial we're using Postman, and maybe in your setup you're running the RESTful service on your local host as well. In both cases, either having a separate server, but using Postman, or running it on local host in the first place, you will not get **cross-origin request errors**. Such errors refer to the fact that generally you're not allowed to access resources across origin, so across domains to put it this way. Of course, with a RESTful service we do want to allow something like this. And therefore I recommend having a look at this GitHub repository here, barryvdh/laravel-cors, which is a third-party package, which is very easy to add and install, and allows you to put your routes under CORS, or to allow cross-origin requests.

You will need this if you want to put your RESTful service into protection. And make sure to install it according to the guidance given on this GitHub page here, and use it like described here.

Basically it's a middleware, which you can apply to routes, and you'll get a refresher on middleware in the chapter on routing. Now since we don't need it for this tutorial, I will not install it here, but as I just said, installing it is really easy.

Adarsh:play-by-play-php-laravel-restful-web-services-started adarshmaurya$ ./composer.phar require barryvdh/laravel-cors
Using version ^0.11.2 for barryvdh/laravel-cors
./composer.json has been created
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
Package operations: 17 installs, 0 updates, 0 removals
  - Installing symfony/polyfill-ctype (v1.10.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/polyfill-mbstring (v1.10.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/http-foundation (v4.2.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/contracts (v1.0.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/event-dispatcher (v4.2.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing psr/log (1.1.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/debug (v4.2.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing symfony/http-kernel (v4.2.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing asm89/stack-cors (1.2.0): Downloading (100%)         
  - Installing symfony/translation (v4.2.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing nesbot/carbon (1.36.1): Loading from cache
  - Installing psr/simple-cache (1.0.1): Loading from cache
  - Installing psr/container (1.0.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing illuminate/contracts (v5.7.15): Downloading (100%)         
  - Installing doctrine/inflector (v1.3.0): Loading from cache
  - Installing illuminate/support (v5.7.15): Downloading (100%)         
  - Installing barryvdh/laravel-cors (v0.11.2): Downloading (100%)         
symfony/contracts suggests installing psr/cache (When using the Cache contracts)
symfony/contracts suggests installing symfony/cache-contracts-implementation
symfony/contracts suggests installing symfony/service-contracts-implementation
symfony/event-dispatcher suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/browser-kit
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/config
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/console
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/dependency-injection
symfony/http-kernel suggests installing symfony/var-dumper
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/config
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/yaml
nesbot/carbon suggests installing friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer (Needed for the `composer phpcs` command. Allow to automatically fix code style.)
nesbot/carbon suggests installing phpstan/phpstan (Needed for the `composer phpstan` command. Allow to detect potential errors.)
illuminate/support suggests installing illuminate/filesystem (Required to use the composer class (5.7.*).)
illuminate/support suggests installing moontoast/math (Required to use ordered UUIDs (^1.1).)
illuminate/support suggests installing ramsey/uuid (Required to use Str::uuid() (^3.7).)
illuminate/support suggests installing symfony/process (Required to use the composer class (^4.1).)
illuminate/support suggests installing symfony/var-dumper (Required to use the dd function (^4.1).)
Writing lock file
Generating autoload files

Wrap Up

So with that, everything's been set up, and you should be ready for this tutorial and the project, which we're going to build throughout this tutorial. Now if you have any questions about Laravel, or you feel like you need some more refreshing, or want to dive deeper into Laravel itself, maybe there are more tutorials in the future. I can strongly recommend the official Laravel documentation, which is a great resource to start if you have certain questions. And of course, as always, Google is your friend. I'm happy to have you on board, and I can't wait to dive into all the other chapters where we actually get to start with the RESTful service together with Laravel.