How to Build a Laravel 5.4 API: Project Creation, Database Setup, Model, Controller, and Routing

This article explains how to develop an API using Laravel 5.4, starting with creating a new Laravel project via Composer.

composer create-project laravel/laravel=5.4.* laravel-api --prefer-dist

The command uses create-project to generate a fresh Laravel installation, specifies the version constraint 5.4.*, sets the target directory laravel-api, and prefers downloading distribution packages for faster builds.

Next, a MySQL database is created and the .env file is updated with the new database credentials. If the .env file does not exist, copy .env.example to .env.

A users table is defined with the following SQL:

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT NULL COMMENT '用户名',
  `phone` varchar(20) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL DEFAULT '' COMMENT '手机号码',
  `created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL COMMENT '创建时间',
  `updated_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP COMMENT '更新时间',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COMMENT='用户表';

After the database is ready, generate an Eloquent model for the users table: php artisan make:model Models/User Then create a controller to handle API requests: php artisan make:controller UserController The generated app/Http/Controllers/UserController.php contains a method to retrieve a user by ID and return it as JSON:

<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller {
    public function getUser($id) {
        $user = User::find($id);
        return response()->json($user);
    }
}

Define a route for the API in routes/api.php: Route::post('/user/{id}', 'UserController@getUser'); Finally, the API can be accessed by sending a POST request to the endpoint, for example: http://your-domain.com/api/user/1 This completes the step‑by‑step setup of a simple Laravel API, including project creation, database configuration, model and controller generation, routing, and testing.