What is Laravel?

I often get asked many questions like, What is PHP laravel used for? What is difference between PHP and laravel? Is laravel pure PHP? Is laravel frontend or backend? Is laravel easier than PHP? Can I learn laravel without PHP?

I have put this article together to answer these questions.

Skip to the getting started part of the guide contained links to code

Laravel is a framework. PHP is programming language. A framework is a way of structuring and organisation your code. In this case, Laravel is a way of structuring and organisation your PHP code.

As you can see, the difference between PHP and laravel, is that PHP is a programming, laravel is a way of ‘writing’ you PHP code. As a result, you cannot learn laravel without PHP.

Often, frameworks follow a particular software design pattern. In this case, Laravel follows a model–view–controller (usually known as MVC) design pattern.

Model - Data, MySQL database
View - Interface user interacts with. Buttons, tables etc.
Controller - Logic.

There are many frameworks for the php programming language, Laravel is popular and well supported.

What is PHP laravel used for?

Laravel is a very powerful and flexible framework. It can be used for both front end, and backend applications.

Laravel does offer some basic frontend functionality out of the box. The main feature being user management. The basic user management allows users to register, login, email reset password etc.

The user management is basic. Often times, you might need more than this. Functionality like user roles, permissions and teams. This can be offered by laravel Jetstream.

Is Laravel easy to learn?

My Step by step guide to getting started (with code).

I have put together a comprehensive step by step guide to get up and running with links to the basic code needed for building a new application in Laravel. This starter code has functionality for user login, teams, profile pictures, API tokens, two-factor authentication (2FA) etc (as shown in the image below).

Getting Started

This getting started section contains links to the main resources I have on my site to help you getting started with Laravel.

Basic Laravel Application

This guide contains a docker development environment and a basic install of Laravel (DevEnv-Docker-LEMP-Laravel).

Laravel Jetstream

This guide contains docker development environment and a basic installation of Laravel Jetstream which provides user login, teams, profile pictures, API tokens, two-factor authentication (2FA) out of the box.

DevEnv-Docker-LEMP-Laravel_Jetstream Jetstream using Livewire fortify tailwind css

Further Resources

Some other resources which might be of use once you have started with Laravel can be found in the list below: