Laravel RESTful APIs and Docker: A Practical Guide

Install Laravel and composer, run four commands in terminal, create a project named Laravel admin, start the server with Artisan serve, and verify in the browser that Laravel is installed.

Learn to connect Laravel with Docker by building a Dockerfile and Docker Compose for backend and MySQL; install PHP 8 Alpine, Composer, and run Artisan serve on localhost.

Test the database connection, set up the admin migrations, and create the users table with first name, last name, email, password, and timestamps using Docker Compose and artisan migrate.

Register a new user by posting first name, last name, email, and password; hash the password, enable fillable and guarded properties, hide the password in responses, return 201 status.

Implement login in Laravel by validating email and password, returning a JWT token on success and an unauthorized error on invalid credentials.

Learn to implement HttpOnly cookies for secure authentication in Laravel RESTful APIs, replacing authorization headers with a jwt cookie, and updating middleware to read the token from the cookie.

Explore how the Laravel IDE helper package enables autocompletion by generating helper files with Artisan commands, highlighting cookies and models, and adding helpful comments.

Paginate the users list in Laravel with per page and page parameters to show 15 records per page, then seed fake users with a factory and Faker in Docker.

Create migrations for roles and permissions, build models and controllers, expose API routes, and connect users to a role with permissions, implementing full role-based access control in Laravel.

Add a role_id to the users table and create a foreign key to the roles table to establish a one-to-many relationship; manage migrations and test via the api.

Master conditional eager loading in Laravel by using with and load on user resources to control when the role is loaded, optimizing single-user views versus lists.

Create a product model with migration, define title, nullable description, image, and a decimal price, and expose it via a Laravel restful API using a dedicated controller, resource, and routes.

Create an image controller to upload files from requests, store them in the public path, and return a public URL while validating uploads as image types such as jpeg.

Seed nested factories to generate orders and their order items with faker data, assign random dates, prices, and quantities, and attach 1–5 items per order.

Develop an export function to generate a CSV of orders and order items, with headers for email, product title, price, and quantity, downloadable as orders.csv.

Build a Laravel chart endpoint by joining orders with order items, summing price times quantity per day, casting to date, and grouping by date for daily chart data.

Test the front end by logging in as admin at Mint.com with password, then explore users, rolls, rules, images, and orders, confirming edits prefill and export options.

Shows creating a store user request with a required POST /users body defined by OpenAPI, including first name, last name, and email, plus token-based update and delete flows.