Laravel Tutorial

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar.

The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.

History

Taylor Otwell created Laravel as an attempt to provide a more advanced alternative to the CodeIgniter framework, which did not provide certain features such as built-in support for user authentication and authorization. Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month. Laravel 1 included built-in support for authentication, localisation, models, views, sessions, routing and other mechanisms, but lacked support for controllers that prevented it from being a true MVC framework.

Laravel 5 was released in February 2015 as a result of internal changes that ended up in renumbering the then-future Laravel 4.3 release. New features in the Laravel 5 release include support for scheduling periodically executed tasks through a package called Scheduler, an abstraction layer called Flysystem that allows remote storage to be used in the same way as local file systems, improved handling of package assets through Elixir, and simplified externally handled authentication through the optional Socialite package. Laravel 5 also introduced a new internal directory tree structure for developed applications.

In March 2015, a SitePoint survey listed Laravel as the most popular PHP framework.

Laravel 5.1, released in June 2015, is the first release of Laravel to receive long-term support, with planned availability of bug fixes for two years and security patches for three years. LTS releases of Laravel are planned to be released every two years.

Laravel 5.3, released in August 23, 2016. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.

Laravel 5.4, released in January 24, 2017. This release had many new features, like Laravel Dusk, Laravel Mix, Blade Components and Slots, Markdown Emails, Automatic Facades, Route Improvements, Higher Order Messaging for Collections, and many others.

Laravel 5.5, released on August 30, 2017.

Laravel 5.6, released on February 7, 2018.

Laravel 5.7, released on September 4, 2018.

Release history

For LTS releases, such as Laravel 5.1, bug fixes are provided for 2 years and security fixes are provided for 3 years. These releases provide the longest window of support and maintenance. For general releases, bug fixes are provided for 6 months and security fixes are provided for 1 year.

Features

The following features serve as Laravel's key design points :

Bundles provide a modular packaging system since the release of Laravel 3, with bundled features already available for easy addition to applications. Furthermore, Laravel 4 uses Composer as a dependency manager to add framework-agnostic and Laravel-specific PHP packages available from the Packagist repository.

Eloquent ORM is an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern, providing at the same time internal methods for enforcing constraints on the relationships between database objects. Following the active record pattern, Eloquent ORM presents database tables as classes, with their object instances tied to single table rows.

Query builder, available since Laravel 3, provides a more direct database access alternative to the Eloquent ORM. Instead of requiring SQL queries to be written directly.