Create Restful API Using Laravel

Hi, I want to share you about how to creating a Restful API service using Laravel. I used “todo list case” for this tutorial, where we have activities and we have more items for an activity.

Our step by step in this tutorial

1. Create new Laravel project
2. Setup database migration
3. Set the API endpoint and work on the backend
4. Test using Postman

Step 1 — Create new Laravel project

Create our new Laravel project by typing this in our terminal:

composer create-project — prefer-dist laravel/laravel todolist

After that, change directory into todolist project directory.

Step 2 — Setup database migration

Before running the migration, make sure we already created the database, so we can set up our .env file first. Just fill the database setup correctly, this is my .env file setup for example:

My .env file setup

After that, we can create a new table for our this project. In todo list case, we need activities table and items table, where the relations of both is one to many, one activity can have more items.

Now, we’ll create activities table migration, we can start with type something like this:

php artisan make:migration create_activities_table — create=activities

we can look at database/migrations folder, there is migration file we are created before, like this:

activities migration

Then we’ll create items table migration, with typing like this:

php artisan make:migration create_items_table — create=items

items migration

We are now finish with migrations setup, let’s running that with typing:

php artisan migrate

After that, we can look at our database, there is some tables like this:

Our database tables after running migration file

Now, our database setup is ready, continue to the next step.

Step 3 — Set the API endpoint and work on the controller

We can setup our routes/api.php file became like this:

routes/api.php setup

Above is our API endpoint setup, I assume you are already experienced with Laravel routes, so I thing the route above is not so hard to understand. After created the routes, now it’s time to create a function in the controller.

We are create each function declared in route in the controller, this is our controller:

<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Activity;
use App\Item;
class ActivitiesController extends Controller
{
    public function store(Request $request)
    {
     $activity_name = $request->input('activity_name');
$data = array(
      'activity_name' => $activity_name
     );
$activity = Activity::create($data);
if ($activity) {
      return response()->json([
                'data' => [
                    'type' => 'activities',
                    'message' => 'Success',
                    'id' => $activity->id,
                    'attributes' => $activity
                ]
            ], 201);
     } else {
      return response()->json([
                'type' => 'activities',
                'message' => 'Fail'
            ], 400);
     }
    }
public function storeLists(Request $request, $activity_id)
    {
     $item_name = $request->input('item_name');
$item = Item::create([
      'item_name' => $item_name,
      'activity_id' => $activity_id,
      'status' => 0
     ]);
if ($item) {
      return response()->json([
                'data' => [
                    'type' => 'activity items',
                    'message' => 'Success',
                    'id' => $item->id,
                    'attributes' => $item
                ]
            ], 201);
     } else {
      return response()->json([
                'type' => 'activity_items',
                'message' => 'Fail'
            ], 400);
     }
    }
public function show()
    {
     $activities = Activity::with('items')->get();
return response()->json([
      'data' => $activities
     ], 200);
    }
public function activityUpdate(Request $request, $activity_id)
    {
     $activity = Activity::find($activity_id);
if ($activity) {
      $activity->activity_name = $request->input('activity_name');
      $activity->save();
return response()->json([
                'data' => [
                    'type' => 'activities',
                    'message' => 'Update Success',
                    'id' => $activity->id,
                    'attributes' => $activity
                ]
            ], 201);
     } else {
      return response()->json([
                'type' => 'activities',
                'message' => 'Not Found'
            ], 404);
     }
    }
public function itemUpdate(Request $request, $activity_id, $item_id)
    {
     $item = Item::where('activity_id', $activity_id)->where('id', $item_id)->first();
if ($item) {
      $item->item_name = $request->input('item_name');
      $item->status = $request->input('status');
      $item->save();
return response()->json([
                'data' => [
                    'type' => 'items',
                    'message' => 'Update Success'
                ]
            ], 201);
     } else {
      return response()->json([
                'type' => 'items',
                'message' => 'Not Found'
            ], 404);
     }
    }
public function getActivityById($activity_id)
    {
     $activity = Activity::with('items')->find($activity_id);
if ($activity) {
      return response()->json([
                'data' => [
                    'type' => 'activities',
                    'message' => 'Success',
                    'attributes' => $activity
                ]
            ], 200);
     } else {
      return response()->json([
                'type' => 'activities',
                'message' => 'Not Found'
            ], 404);
     }
    }
public function activityDestroy($activity_id)
    {
        $activity = Activity::find($activity_id);
if ($activity) {
            $activity->delete();
return response()->json([], 204);
        } else {
            return response()->json([
                'type' => 'activities',
                'message' => 'Not Found'
            ], 404);
        }
    }
public function activityItemDestroy($activity_id, $item_id)
    {
        $item = Item::where('activity_id', $activity_id)->where('id', $item_id)->first();
if ($item) {
            $item->delete();
return response()->json([], 204);
        } else {
            return response()->json([
                'type' => 'items',
                'message' => 'Not Found'
            ], 404);
        }
    }
}

The last step is test the API service using Postman, let’s go..

Step 4 — Test using postman

Please look at my github repository, there is endpoint you can try to call using postman,

API Endpoint

I will try to call this API endpoint https://lit-atoll-41704.herokuapp.com/api/v1/activities with GET request to get all activities data. The result is like this:

Call API endpoint using postman

Finally, our API is ready to use, hopefully this tutorial is help you all guys, thanks for reading :)