I was able to get started pretty quickly with the following boilerplate: github.com/francescomalatesta/laravel-api-boilerp…
To add on top of Hugo Rodrigues's answer, I would also include Dingo API which includes a lot of nice features for APIs such as versioning, rate limiting, formatting responses, and generating documentation. My main issue with the documentation generator is that it creates a single Markdown file, so you may want to use a different tool for that if you expect your API to be very big.