Building an API with Laravel

I'm going to create an API for a new project. I have done trial and error before, but honestly APIs gets messy fast and hard to refactor without breaking a lot of stuff.

I am doing RESTful but besides that I don't have any guidelines for myself. Which packages for Laravel would you recommend me to create a better streamlined flow or which advices do you have?

If you're using Laravel 5.5 you can utilize Eloquent API Resources laravel.com/docs/5.5/eloquent-resources which is loosely based on Fractal fractal.thephpleague.com which you could also use instead if you needed something more robust.

Versioning is a tough topic, but this article should help you out blog.apisyouwonthate.com/api-versioning-has-no-ri…

Thanks. That was a good help on the way. But how about structuring the URLs?

Typically I try to stick with a single resource per URL group. If I have to, I might add a sub-resource, but only if those sub-resources are minimal. I definitely do not have more than one sub resource. Usually, sub-resources could just be designed as top level resources. For example, this is "ok":

Route::resource('posts', 'PostsController'); 
Route::resource('posts.comments', 'PostsCommentsController');

but, in my opinion, this would be "better":

Route::resource('posts', 'PostsController'); 
Route::resource('comments', 'CommentsController');

Your milage may vary though, it also depends on what your app does, or what you might want to do with it in the future. In the top example, you are somewhat assuming that comments only belong on posts. If that's the case, you're probably fine.

In the second example, comments are on the top level and can be potentially attached to anything. Not only Posts, but also maybe Pages, User Profiles, anything really.

If you are new to laravel then i think i can suggest this link : itsolutionstuff.com/post/how-to-create-rest-api-i… for create api, i think this is better because in that link i see it's create basic coman function for success and error response. You can do it simply RESTFul API with laravel 5.5 app.

Thanks :)

Hey Emil,

I run codeburst.io and we have 7 tutorials on Laravel API's that you might consider checking out for motivation and/or ideas (free):

codeburst.io/search

I would strongly recommend Dingo API package github.com/dingo/api

We've build full api for our project within 1 day thanks to that package github.com/akaunting/akaunting

Although this isn't a very popular opinion, I've found Lumen to be really great to build an API with.

It's very light and I haven't come up against any problems when trying to create a fairly complex API. There's nothing in there that I've thought "Oh damn! We should be using a full-blown Laravel installation."

Admittedly, it is missing a couple of features that you might be used to if you're familiar with Laravel, but if you don't mind simplifying/separating some stuff out (i.e. OAuth in a separate service OR just using API keys, for example) and writing a little bit of piping, you can achieve great things.

The performance of Lumen is great for our needs and we've managed to create a really flexible and efficient API with it that conforms to the JSON-API standard, uses OAuth for access delegation and much more, without tying us to a particular package.

I'd be happy to go into more detail separately about some of the things we've done to make this work well.

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