Laravel — The PHP Framework for Web Artisans

What Laravel Does

• Routing — expressive route definitions
• Eloquent ORM — ActiveRecord pattern, relationships, scopes
• Blade templates — lightweight, compiled template engine
• Artisan CLI — code generation, migrations, tinker REPL
• Queues — Redis, SQS, database queue drivers
• Events and broadcasting — event-driven + WebSocket (Reverb)
• Auth — sessions, API tokens (Sanctum), OAuth (Passport)
• Livewire — reactive frontend components in PHP
• Testing — PHPUnit + Pest integration
• Inertia.js — SPA without building an API

Architecture

MVC: Models (Eloquent), Views (Blade), Controllers. Service container provides IoC/DI. Facades wrap services for static-like syntax. Middleware pipeline for request/response processing. SOLID principles and PSR standards throughout.

Self-Hosting

# Production on Linux + Nginx
composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache

Or use Laravel Forge (automated server provisioning) or Vapor (serverless on AWS Lambda).

Key Features

• Eloquent ORM
• Blade templates
• Artisan CLI
• Queue system
• Broadcasting (Reverb WebSocket)
• Sanctum API auth
• Livewire for reactive UI
• Inertia.js for modern SPAs
• Pest testing framework
• Laravel Forge and Vapor ecosystem

Comparison

FAQ

Q: Laravel vs Symfony? A: Laravel is more opinionated, faster to develop with, and has great DX; Symfony is more modular, enterprise-grade, with reusable components (in fact, Laravel uses many Symfony components under the hood).

Q: Livewire replaces React? A: For moderately interactive apps, yes. Livewire lets you write reactive UIs in PHP, skipping the frontend/backend split. For very complex interactions, React/Vue + Inertia is still recommended.

Q: Performance concerns? A: With PHP 8.3 + OPcache + route/config cache + Octane (Swoole/FrankenPHP), performance rivals Node.js.

Sources

• Docs: https://laravel.com/docs
• GitHub: https://github.com/laravel/laravel
• License: MIT