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In this chapter of our Laravel journey (remember, I’m learning as I write these articles, so this will be one of the most realistic tutorial series you can find!), we’ll dive into our Laravel project. We’ll explore the project structure, get familiar with migrations, and break down the MVC architecture in the simplest way possible.
Exploring Our Project Structure ?️
Setting Up a Database & Learning About Migrations ?️
Understanding MVC & Creating Some MVC Elements ?
Upon your first launch of VSCode in your newly created Laravel project, you might find the directory structure a bit intimidating. Here's a quick overview of what each key directory does:
Good News: You don’t need to know everything right now. Keep this cheatsheet handy!
Bad News: You'll need to learn about these as the series progresses. I'll add "knowledge checkpoints" to remind you of their purposes.
Let’s get a taste of Laravel! Open your terminal and type:
php artisan serve
Then, head over to your browser and visit localhost:8000. You should see something like this:
Important: Ensure your server and DB are running (if using XAMPP, as explained in my previous article).
If you're used to JavaScript, think of php artisan serve as similar to npm run dev.
Artisan is a powerful command-line tool that comes with Laravel, making various tasks easy and quick. The serve command starts a local development server. We'll use Artisan more as we progress, so don’t worry too much about it right now.
A web app is essentially a wrapper for a database. Laravel supports various databases:
You don’t need to configure it; it’s the default database.
Edit your .env file to uncomment the MySQL configuration:
SQLite Config
MySQL Config
The .env file is like a switchboard for toggling configurations on and off.
Before diving deeper into MVC in future articles, let’s get a quick overview with some baby examples.
MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. It’s a design pattern that separates concerns in your application:
Here’s a Greeting model for storing messages:
// app/Models/Greeting.php namespace App\Models; use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model; class Greeting extends Model { protected $table = 'greetings'; protected $fillable = ['message']; }
The view displays the greeting message:
<!-- resources/views/greeting.blade.php --> <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Greeting</title> </head> <body> <h1>{{ $message }}</h1> </body> </html>
The controller fetches the greeting message and passes it to the view:
// app/Http/Controllers/GreetingController.php namespace App\Http\Controllers; use App\Models\Greeting; use Illuminate\Http\Request; class GreetingController extends Controller { public function show() { $greeting = Greeting::first(); return view('greeting', ['message' => $greeting->message]); } }
In this setup:
In future articles, we'll dive deeper into each component and explore more complex examples. Stay tuned! ?
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