Lesson 1: Introducing Laravel — The most elegant PHP framework

Laravel: From Basics to Advanced

Part 1: Laravel Fundamentals

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1. What is Laravel?

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework, philosophically "elegant syntax" — code is clean, easy to read, developer experience comes first. Laravel provides a complete ecosystem: ORM (Eloquent), queue, cache, auth, testing, deployment.

Framework	Language	ORM	Advantages
Laravel	PHP	Eloquent	Big ecosystem, great DX
Symfony	PHP	Doctrine	Enterprise, flexible
Django	Python	Django ORM	Batteries-included, admin built-in
Spring Boot	Java	JPA/Hibernate	Enterprise, microservices

2. PHP 8.4 Essentials

<?php
// Enums
enum UserRole: string {
    case Admin = 'admin';
    case Staff = 'staff';
    case Customer = 'customer';
}

// Readonly properties
class Product {
    public function __construct(
        public readonly string $name,
        public readonly float $price,
    ) {}
}

// Named arguments
$user = User::create(
    name: 'John',
    email: '[email protected]',
    role: UserRole::Customer,
);

// Match expression
$label = match($status) {
    'active' => 'Hoạt động',
    'inactive' => 'Tạm dừng',
    default => 'Không xác định',
};

3. Install Laravel

# Với Composer
composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app

# Với Laravel Installer
composer global require laravel/installer
laravel new my-app

# Với Laravel Sail (Docker)
curl -s "https://laravel.build/my-app?with=pgsql,redis" | bash
cd my-app && ./vendor/bin/sail up

4. Folder structure

my-app/
├── app/
│   ├── Http/Controllers/
│   ├── Models/
│   └── Providers/
├── config/
├── database/
│   ├── factories/
│   ├── migrations/
│   └── seeders/
├── resources/views/
├── routes/
│   ├── web.php
│   └── api.php
├── storage/
├── tests/
├── .env
└── artisan

# Artisan commands
php artisan serve          # Dev server
php artisan make:model Product -mfc  # Model + migration + factory + controller
php artisan migrate        # Chạy migrations
php artisan tinker         # REPL

Next article: Routing, Controllers & Middleware.