Laravel Best Practices and Standards Guide

June 5, 2023 by Max

Laravel! Ever heard of it? I bet you have if you’re a part of the web development world. But what makes Laravel so special? What are the Best Laravel Practices and Standards you follow to make your Laravel-based application efficient, maintainable, and simply superior?

That’s precisely what we’re about to delve into. So buckle up; it’s going to be an enlightening ride!

Introduction

Importance of Coding Standards

Remember when you picked up your first Lego set and followed the guide to create the picture-perfect castle on the box? Similarly, coding standards are like a guide to creating efficient and maintainable code. They help ensure that your code is clean, readable, and beautiful to look at (yes, code can be beautiful!), so welcome to our comprehensive guide on the Best Laravel Practices and Standards.

Brief Introduction to Laravel

Enter Laravel, a free, open-source PHP web framework intended for the development of web applications. Laravel offers a beautiful syntax that can make web development a joy. It eases tasks such as routing, authentication, sessions, caching, and more, which makes it a preferred choice among developers.

Understanding Laravel

History and Evolution

Created by Taylor Otwell in 2011, Laravel has come a long way. It’s not just a tool but a whole ecosystem for developing modern web applications. With every new version, Laravel has introduced features to make web development more effortless.

Why Choose Laravel?

You may ask, “Why Laravel?” The answer lies in its simplicity and elegance. It is user-friendly, easy to understand, and offers robust features that make it a comprehensive platform for developers. Laravel also follows MVC (Model-View-Controller), an architectural pattern that separates an application into three main logical components.

Understanding Laravel Architecture

The MVC pattern is what gives Laravel its power. Models correspond to your database structure, Views represent your user interface, and Controllers are the bridge connecting them. Laravel’s service container, a powerful tool for managing class dependencies, is at the heart of Laravel’s architecture.

The Laravel Framework

Installation & Setup

Starting with Laravel is like a breeze. With Composer, Laravel can be installed and set up in a few minutes. Just ensure you meet the server requirements before you dive in.

The Structure of Laravel

Laravel follows a well-defined directory structure. It’s clean and organised, and you will know where to find what.

Understanding MVC in Laravel

In Laravel, the MVC pattern makes it easier to manage complexity by separating the application logic from the user interface.

Best Practices in Laravel

Let’s delve into the Best Laravel Practices and Standards that will make your Laravel-based application efficient, maintainable, and superior.

Using Eloquent ORM

One of the star features of Laravel is Eloquent ORM. It’s an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern that allows you to interact with your database like you would with SQL.

Applying SOLID Principles

Remember the SOLID principles? They are the five principles of Object-Oriented Design that promote more understandable, flexible, and maintainable code. When you apply these principles to your Laravel project, you’ll see how they elevate your coding game.

Keeping Controllers Thin

The saying “Fat models, skinny controllers” is popular in the Laravel community. This principle states that the bulk of your logic should be in the model, while the controller should handle only the request and response.

Organising Routes

Routes are the heart of your Laravel application. Organising them in a way that reflects the application structure and is easy to understand is a best practice you shouldn’t overlook.

Writing Efficient Laravel Code

Using Artisan Commands

Artisan is Laravel’s command-line interface. It includes several commands that assist you while you build your application. It’s like having your personal assistant!

Using Laravel’s Blade Templating Engine

Blade is Laravel’s simple yet powerful templating engine. Unlike other PHP templating engines, Blade does not restrict you from using plain PHP code in your views.

Dependency Injection and Service Containers

Dependency Injection is a design pattern that allows for IoC (Inversion of Control). Laravel’s service container is a powerful tool for managing class dependencies and performing dependency injection.

Testing in Laravel

Unit Testing

Unit tests focus on a small piece of code. Laravel is built with testing in mind and comes with PHPUnit integrated.

Feature Testing

Feature tests ensure that your application’s larger portions of code are working correctly.

Using PHP Unit in Laravel

Laravel’s integration with PHPUnit makes it easy to run tests for your application and ensure it behaves as expected.

Laravel Packages and Libraries

Using Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. Laravel utilises Composer to manage its dependencies and to ensure the right versions of packages are being used.

Useful Laravel Packages

Laravel has a rich ecosystem of packages that can significantly boost your productivity. Some of them are Laravel Debugbar, Laravel IDE Helper, Laravel Telescope, and many more.

Conclusion

This comprehensive guide provides you with a deep understanding of Laravel and the Best Laravel Practices and Standards that will help you write efficient, maintainable, and superior code. Laravel, with its elegant syntax and robust features, has indeed changed the landscape of web development. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, Laravel has something in store for you. Embrace these practices and see your web development journey reach new heights!

FAQs

What is Laravel used for?
- Laravel is a web application framework with an expressive, elegant syntax aimed at making web development tasks, such as routing, persistence, queuing, caching, and security, easier for developers.
Why is Laravel so popular?
- Laravel is popular due to its robust features and ease of use. It’s a complete and developer-friendly framework that speeds up the web development process.
What databases does Laravel support?
- Laravel supports a variety of databases, including MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and SQL Server.
Is Laravel suitable for large-scale applications?
- Absolutely! Laravel is excellent for large-scale applications due to its efficiency, security features, and scalability.
How secure is Laravel?
- Laravel takes security seriously and provides several built-in mechanisms to protect your application. It handles many security aspects, like protection from SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting.

How to install Laravel on Windows (With Tailwind)

February 10, 2022 by Max

This tutorial will guide you on how to install Laravel on windows so you can begin to develop and create websites with the framework. Additionally, we will also install Tailwind, a super easy to use CSS framework.

Requirements

Laravel uses Composer to manage all of its dependencies, to download Composer click here, or use our tutorial on installing Composer on Windows.

Installing

With Composer installed open your command line and run the following command. It will install Laravel globally on your computer and also add itself to the path.

composer global require laravel/installer

Testing it works

Now we will quickly check it has installed correctly. Create or navigate to a folder for testing and open it within the command line.

laravel new testApp
cd testApp
php artisan serve

Image of Laravel's start page — Laravel start page

You should now be able to see in your browser the default Laravel Page. Congratulations you have successfully installed Laravel, now have fun making something brilliant.

Installing Tailwind on Laravel

Requirements

Installing Tailwind requires NPM you can download that here, or follow our tutorial here.

Installation

Tailwind is a super easy-to-use CSS framework, if you wish to use it with Laravel you will need to follow the steps below on each new project you start.

First of all, make sure you are within a Laravel project or are in the test folder from above. You can then run the installation command.

npm install -D tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer

This installs Tailwind. Next, we initialise Tailwind within the project and generate its config files.

npm tailwindcss init

Now we need to add Tailwind to the Mix config file. Open the file called webpack.mix.js and add tailwindcss as a plugin.

Next, we add our blade templates to the tailwind.config.js file. We are adding all possible templates even if we do not necessarily use all of them in the project e.g. Vue.js.

Finally, we can add the directives to our projects /resources/css/app.css file.

To have your app update the CSS as you develop you can run.

npm run watch

Optionally you can have all the CSS preloaded during development.

npm run dev

When you are ready to release for production you can run the following command to have only the CSS you require for your project within app.css.

npm run prod

This concludes the tutorial on how to install Laravel and Tailwind, go forward and create something amazing!

How to install Composer on Windows

February 5, 2022 by Max

Composer is a command-line tool used to manage and download PHP dependencies and tools, today we will be installing it on Windows.

Installing Composer

First, we must download the latest Composer File, we can get this at the official website here.

We want to be clicking on the Composer-Setup.exe link, this will download the Setup executable and will ensure we have the latest file.

Composer installation wizard — Installation wizard

Once the file has been downloaded and you click run you can follow these steps.

Click install for All users, then click next.
Leave developer mode unchecked, we do not want this as it is not the recommend option.
Select the version of PHP you have installed, if you do not have PHP installed then you will need to install it from here.
Composer will then quickly check your PHP before showing you a Proxy setting, leave this blank and click next.
Finally you will be shown an overview, if everything is as we selected click install.

Verifying the installation

To validate that it was installed correctly go to a command prompt and type the following to see your version.

composer --version

You should see something similar to the following.

Uninstalling

To uninstall we recommend navigating to Control Panel -> Programs -> Uninstall a program.

And then selecting Composer and clicking uninstall. This will ensure all of the files are correctly uninstalled from your computer.

Uninstalling can be helpful if it starts playing up or you want to reset it back to factory defaults, and with that, we conclude our tutorial, we hope it was helpful and Composer serves you well in your future projects.