1. Getting Started

Introduction

Laravel JSON:API is a library for creating JSON:API server implementations (backends) using the Laravel application framework.

To try it out, let's create a simple blog application. This will comprise of blog posts that are created by an author (the signed-in user). The author will be allowed to tag posts, while other users can comment on a blog post.

By following this tutorial, you'll learn how the JSON:API specification works, and how to implement a JSON:API compliant server in a Laravel application.

In this chapter, we'll setup our Laravel application so we're ready to develop our blog application.

Requirements

To follow this tutorial, you'll need the following:

• Composer
• Docker

This tutorial assumes you are using Laravel Sail to run your application in Docker. There are other ways of running Laravel - e.g. Homestead. If you want to use an alternative method then make sure you follow the relevant Laravel documentation on how to setup an application.

You'll also need a method of submitting AJAX requests to your application. For example, Postman, PHPStorm HTTP requests, or cURL. The tutorial shows the HTTP requests you'll need to submit, but how to do that will depend on the HTTP client you are using.

Example Application

You will learn more if you follow this tutorial and incrementally build the application. Learning by doing is always the best way to learn!

However, if you want to see the complete application, you can find it on Github in the laravel-json-api/tutorial-app repository.

Installation

To get started, we'll need to create our new Laravel application. To do this, we'll follow the Your First Laravel Project instructions. This contains information on creating your first project and running it using Docker - there's instructions for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

Assuming you have Docker installed and running, on Linux we create our application by running the following command:

curl -s https://laravel.build/jsonapi-tutorial | bash

Once this has finished running, we'll use Laravel Sail to start our new application:

cd jsonapi-tutorial && ./vendor/bin/sail up

To check your application is running, go to http://localhost/ in your browser. You should see a default Laravel page.

TIP

As this tutorial is about JSON:API, we haven't included extensive information on starting the project for the first time. Refer to the Laravel installation documentation for more details.

For this tutorial, you'll also need to run Artisan commands. Check that Artisan is working by running:

vendor/bin/sail artisan -V

That command should output the Laravel version, for example:

Laravel Framework 8.61.0

In Summary

You've create a brand new Laravel application, and are running it locally.

In the next chapter we'll add the database tables and models required for our blog application.