The Laravel Survival Guide Tony Lea

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The Laravel Survival Guide

Tony Lea
© 2015 - 2016 Tony Lea

Table of Contents
Thanks
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Getting Started
Chapter 2 - Composer & The Laravel Installer
Chapter 3 - The Laravel Structure
Chapter 4 - Routing
Chapter 5 - Models
Chapter 6 - Model Relationships
Chapter 7 - Mutators
Chapter 8 - Views
Chapter 9 - Blade
Chapter 10 - Controllers
Chapter 11 - Piecing It Together
Chapter 12 - Artisan
Chapter 13 - Middleware
Chapter 14 - Authentication
Chapter 15 - Requests
Chapter 16 - Responses
Chapter 17 - Migrations
Chapter 18 - Seeds
Chapter 19 - Security
Chapter 20 - Testing
Chapter 21 - Wrapping Up

Thanks
I want to give a special thanks to my family for always being supportive. I especially want
to thank my wife for being an amazing woman and for pushing me to try and be the best
person I can be. This book would not be possible without the love and support of my
amazing family.
Additionally, I want to thank to David Cullinan for helping out with book.
Ok, enough with all the thanks. Let’s start learning Laravel!

Introduction

Why The Book? Well, it’s not really a book… It’s more of a guide (hence the title). A
guide to save yourself and others from becoming a zombie developer!
What exactly is a zombie developer? Well, a zombie developer is a developer like you or
I, yet they mindlessly hack on PHP apps and do the same thing over and over. These
repetitive tasks are incredibly time consuming, and make the developer brain dead. When
this happens it gives them a thirst for blood and an urge to kill.
So, instead of letting this happen the developer could have used the amazing Laravel
framework for rapid application development. This will help them keep their sanity and it
will make coding enjoyable again. Oh, yeah… And it’ll save lives.
By learning the basics of Laravel you can save yourself, and possibly others, from
becoming a deteriorating zombie developer.
Don’t let that inner zombie revive, be sure to keep in hand this Laravel survival guide.

Chapter 1 - Getting Started

A zombie developer is very slow at setting up a new project, whereas a Laravel developer
can run a few commands to set up a new project in a matter of seconds!
Being aware of one’s environment is crucial to surviving the zombie developer
apocalypse. In this chapter, we will briefly go over setting up your local environment.
Quick note: We will not go into full detail of installing system requirements such as PHP, MySQL, and
Apache. Instead, we are just going to give a quick overview on setting up your local development
environment so that way we can start getting into the code as soon as possible.

Your Local Development Environment
A local environment, also referred to as the “development environment”, is when you
work on your web app from your computer. When you are ready to make your application
available for the world to see you will move your code to another server referred to as the
“production environment”.
So, when we set up your local development environment we are referring to setting up the
required applications to run a Laravel app on your computer.
A basic local development environment for Laravel typically requires 3 applications,
which are:
1. Apache or Nginx (the web server for your application)
2. MySQL (the database for your application)
3. PHP (the server-side scripting language for your application)
There are many programs for each operating system that will install all these applications
for you. Just to name a few there is MAMP, WampServer, and XAMPP. You can feel free
to check out the links below for these applications:
https://www.mamp.info/en/ (Mac and Windows)
http://www.wampserver.com/en/ (Windows)
https://www.apachefriends.org/ (Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Be sure to read the docs for all the system requirements at http://laravel.com/docs.
There is also one last way of getting your local development environment setup for
Laravel that is well worth mentioning. It is called a virtual machine that has all the system
requirements already installed. You can learn more about setting up a Laravel virtual
machine at http://laravel.com/docs/homestead.
There is no right or wrong way to setup your local development environment as long as
you meet the minimum system requirements for Laravel. Find a way that works for you
and start building the next latest and greatest web app!
Okay, Let’s move on to Composer and the Laravel Installer.

Chapter 2 - Composer & The Laravel Installer

A zombie developer manually moves files into their project, whereas a Laravel developer
leverages composer to install tools and libraries.
Taking on the zombie developer apocalypse on your own would be almost impossible.
Getting help from others is essential, and that’s exactly what composer allows us to do.
Composer is used to include libraries from other developers into our application.
Let’s continue.

Composer & The Laravel Installer
How easy would it be if you could open up a command prompt and type in:
$

And a Laravel app is created inside a folder named “blog”. Well, that’s what the laravel
installer does. So, let’s learn how we can use this on our computer.
The Laravel installer, as well as many PHP packages, make use of a dependency manager
called Composer (http://getcomposer.org) to add this functionality.

So, What exactly is a dependency manager?
Well, a dependency manager is nothing more than a tool to manage your dependencies.
“WHAT!!!?”, yeah the definition still sounds pretty abstract, right?
Let me put this another way to help you understand how Composer works.
I know you are probably a fan of eating pizza instead of eating brains, so let’s pretend we
could use a command to make us a pizza:
$

By default, we are given a pepperoni pizza. But let’s say we wanted this command to
make us a pizza with different toppings. Perhaps we wanted a meat-lovers pizza. We
would probably need the following toppings:
{
"toppings" : [
"peperoni", "ham", "bacon", "beef", "sausage"
]
}

Now, if we save this file in our current directory and name it ‘composer.json’ and run the
command again:
$

DING! We now get our meat-lovers pizza instead of our pepperoni pizza.
Hazzzaa!
As you can see Composer is a way of managing the things we need to build our app (or
pizza).
Composer is also a command line tool we can use it to install other command line tools.
One of those tools is the Laravel installer.
To add the Laravel installer to our computer, we must first install composer.
Visit https://getcomposer.org/, click on the ‘Getting Started’ button, navigate to ‘Installing
Globally’, and walk through how to globally install composer on your machine.
After downloading and installing composer you can run the following command to add the
Laravel installer.
$

"laravel/installer=~1.1"

Now we have successfully added the laravel installer to your machine, and you can easily
create a new laravel app by typing:
$

Then navigate to your new app_name folder in a command prompt. And run:
$

Finally, navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser and you will see a ‘Welcome to
Laravel’ screen.
Now you’re ready to start building your amazing app!
Warning: If the laravel installer does not globally work you may need to specify where the composer bin
directory is located on your machine. Visit http://devdojo.com/post/composer-bin-directory-path to learn
how to do this.

How awesome is this?
With a single command line, you can be up and running with a new Laravel app in a few
seconds!
You can learn more about the Laravel installer at http://laravel.com/docs.

Chapter 3 - The Laravel Structure

A zombie developer puts files all over the place causing an unstable structure, whereas a
Laravel developer keeps their structure clean and consistent.
A solid structure is essential for making your app efficient and awesome. Zombie
developers are used to ruins and destruction, but as a new Laravel developer, you will get
accustomed to a solid foundation and structure.
In this chapter, we are going to give you a brief overview of the Laravel file structure.

The Laravel Structure
In a new laravel project you will have the following code structure:

You will see nine folders which are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

app
bootstrap
config
database
public
resources
storage
tests
vendor

I’m not going to go into detail with all the files; however, I will give you a brief rundown
of each folder.
App
This is the directory that has all our application logic. In this folder, we will put all our
models, controllers, services, and many other classes.
Bootstrap

This folder is used to bootstrap laravel (startup laravel).
Config
This file will contain many of our global configurations for our application.
Database
This folder contains our database files such as migrations and seeds.
Public
This public folder contains many of the applications assets such as images, stylesheets,
and scripts.
Resources
We will put our view files in this folder. The views are the pages that a user sees.
Storage
Laravel uses this folder to store sessions, caches, and logs in this folder.
Test
This folder contains files that we use to test the logic of our application.
Vendor
This is the folder that contains our dependencies. When you add new libraries (toppings)
to your app, this is the folder that will contain those libraries.

Do you recognize the composer.json file from the image above? Remember this is where
we define our dependencies (pizza toppings) for our app.
One important file worth mentioning is a file called .env; this is the file that contains
configurations such as debug mode and database credentials. So, when you need to
connect a database to your Laravel app you will need to update the following code in that
file:
1
2
3
4

You will replace the database name, username, and password accordingly based on your
credentials. Add your database credentials to these variables and it will be available for
your app to use.
Finally, there is one particular file that I want to point out. The routes.php file, which is
located in app/Http/routes.php. This is the file that we will add all of the routes for our
application, and this is what we are going to cover in the next chapter.
So, Let’s move onto some fun stuff!

Chapter 4 - Routing

A zombie developer reinvents the wheel and creates their own routing system, whereas a
Laravel developer leverages the built-in router that is simple to use, extremely flexible,
and super efficient.
Using a powerful routing system in your app is crucial for keeping your sanity and
preventing brain deterioration. When a user navigates your app they won’t run into a dead
end; they’ll hit the correct “route” instead.

Routing overview
Just to be sure everyone is on the same page, we’ll give you a brief run down of app
routing.
You can think of a route as being similar to a road. For instance, “We drove down the road
(route) to the graveyard.” When referring to routes in an application, it is essentially the
same. When you type a website URL like site.com/graveyard, you are telling the
browser that the graveyard is the route you want to take. The application then says, “Ok,
you want to go to the ‘graveyard’? This is the output I have for the graveyard route.”
This can be done very easily using Laravel, for instance:
1 
2
3

4 

When the user submits the form in the code above the data inside the form will be posted
to the site.com/zombie POST route.
How about the PUT and DELETE method? Well, the next 2 methods will need to have a
hidden input type to specify that it is a PUT or a DELETE. For example:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13












In the previous code sample the forms will send data to the PUT & DELETE route
respectively.

Quick Routing example
Let’s go through a quick route example of how we might destroy a zombie!
First we need to have a form where we can delete a zombie. Let’s say that we have the
following code in one of our views:
1 

2

3

4

5 

The view above will show a button titled ‘Destroy’. For simplicity purposes we are just
hard-coding an input with an ID of 2, but normally this would change based on the ID of
the zombie you actually want to delete.
Next we need to create our route that will delete that zombie:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

input('id');
Zombie::destroy($id);
});

And just like that we have destroyed the zombie with an ID of 2 :) Pretty cool!
Additionally, notice that we specified a Request variable in the function above. This is
simply a class provided by Laravel that allows us to capture request information. But,
before we can use the Request class we have to specify the namespace:
1

Quick Note: Unfortunately, the above example will not fully work since we have not setup our database or
models just yet, but we will do that in the next chapter.

In the above route examples, we are using route closures. Let’s move on to talk about
route closures vs route controllers.

Route Closures vs Route Controller Actions
A route closure is when we specify a route, and we run a function containing code. This is
a route closure:
1 name . '
';
6
echo 'Strength: ' . $zombie->strength . '
';
7
echo 'Health: ' . $zombie->health . '
';
8 });

Above we are getting the zombie with an ID 5 and we are displaying their name, strength,
and their health level.
The example above will not entirely work since we have not set up our Models or our database yet. So, with
that being said let’s move on to talk about our model classes.

Chapter 5 - Models

A zombie developer creates complex SQL queries, whereas a Laravel developer extends
the Eloquent Model Class and benefits from beautiful and readable database interaction.
Zombie Developers often use complicated queries that can lead to bad and infectious
code. As a Laravel developer we must keep our queries strong & healthy.
We must MODEL some good behavior.

Models
A model is a PHP class that handles all the interaction between the code and the database.
When using Laravel we can extend the Eloquent Model class and all our interaction will
automatically be built-in.
Take a look at what an example zombie model would look like (this file would be placed
inside of the /app folder):
name . '
';
8
echo 'Strength: ' . $zombie->strength . '
';
9
echo 'Health: ' . $zombie->health . '
';
10 });

Before we would not be able to run our application because our code would not know
where to access the Zombie class, but now that the Model is created we can access it.
Note that we are telling our app that when we call Zombie we want to use the zombie class located at
App\Zombie. This is referred to as namespaces, something that we will dig further into in a future chapter.

We still have a problem, though.
We will not be able to access the route from above because we do not have any zombies in
our database, so let’s go ahead and create a new zombie with the following route.
1 
5
6
7
8
9
10 });



type="text" name="strength" placeholder="Strength">

type="text" name="health" placeholder="Health">

type="submit" value="Create New Zombie">

';

And if we visited that route in our browser (site.com/admin/zombies/create), we would
end up with a simple form.

When this form gets submitted it will post to the site.com/admin/zombies/create POST
route, which should look like the following:
1 all();
// create a new zombie
$zombie = new Zombie();
$zombie->name = $post_data['name'];
$zombie->strength = $post_data['strength'];
$zombie->health = $post_data['health'];
$zombie->save();
});

And we submitted the form with the following data:
Name: Johnny Bullet Holes
Strength: Strong
Health: 70
Then we would end up with the following row in our database.

How easy is that! We just created our first Zombie. So, if we were to visit the following
route (site.com/zombie/1), we would be directed to the following route from above:
1 Route::get('/zombie/{id}', function($id){
2
3
4
5

$zombie = Zombie::find($id);
echo 'Name: ' . $zombie->name . '
';
echo 'Strength: ' . $zombie->strength . '
';
echo 'Health: ' . $zombie->health . '
';

6 });

And we would see the following output in our browser.

Awesome, right? How much easier could it be? Well, it gets a little easier, instead of
creating a zombie by adding the name, strength, and health manually we could always do
this in one line.
Check out the following:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

all();
// create a new zombie
$zombie = Zombie::create($post_data);
});
?>

If we tried to submit to the route above, we would probably get an error message saying
‘MassAssignmentException’. This means that we are trying to assign a mass amount of
data to our Zombie class, but we have not specified what is ok to add when creating a new
Zombie.
This is a level of security that Laravel offers.
To tell our zombie class that we want to be able to create a zombie and allow name,
strength, and health all at once we would add the following in our Zombie class:
1 protected $fillable = ['name', 'strength', 'health'];

So, the full class would look like:
1 name . '
';
echo 'Strength: ' . $zombie->strength . '
';
echo 'Health: ' . $zombie->health . '
';
$weapon = Weapon::where('zombie_id', '=', $zombie->id)->first();
echo 'Weapon: ' . $weapon->name . '
';
});

We just introduced another new helper provided by the Eloquent library; this is the where
function. Before we just used find which returned the object with an ID.
Above we are using Weapon::where('zombie_id', '=', $zombie->id)- >first();.
What is happening here is that we want to get the weapon where the zombie_id is equal to
our zombie id, and we want to get the first row.
You can learn more about all the different ways to retrieve data from our models by
checking out the full documentation on Eloquent here: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent.
The above example will get the job done; however, there is an even easier way of doing
this. If we specify our relationship between the zombie and the weapon we can minify the
amount of code we need to add. We could add our relationship to our Zombie Model, and
that would look something like this:
1 hasOne('App\Weapon');
}

Above we are saying that a Zombie has one Weapon. We just create a new public function
called weapon() and return the weapon.
So, with that addition to our Zombie Model we can now refactor our code and display all
the information about our Zombie like this:
1 name . '
';
8
echo 'Strength: ' . $zombie->strength . '
';
9
echo 'Health: ' . $zombie->health . '
';
10
echo 'Weapon: ' . $zombie->weapon->name . '
';
11 });

How great is that! By adding that relationship we just took these two lines of code:
1 $weapon = Weapon::where('zombie_id', '=', $zombie->id)->first();
2 echo 'Weapon: ' . $weapon->name . '
';

and turned it into this one line:
1 echo 'Weapon: ' . $zombie->weapon->name . '
';

Being more readable and easier to work with, If we now visit (site.com/zombie/1) we
should get our output which will look like the following:

To see all the information about our zombie with an ID of 2 we could then visit
(site.com/zombie/2)

One last thing before we move on, what if we had the ID of our weapon and we wanted to
see to which zombie it belonged? This can be achieved in the same way.
We can add our relationship in our Weapon class, but instead of the hasOne relationship,
we will use the belongsTo relationship since a Weapon belongs to a zombie. To add this
relationship we will add a zombie method to our Weapons model that will return a Zombie
object like so:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

belongsTo('App\Zombie');
}
}

Now, we could add the following route:
1 use App\Weapon as Weapon;
2
3 Route::get('/weapon/{id}', function($id){
4
$weapon = Weapon::find($id);
5
echo "This " . $weapon->name . " belongs to " . $weapon->zombie->name;
6 });

We can now get to the zombie that owns this weapon by accessing $weapon->zombie. And
if we were to visit (site.com/weapon/1) we would get the following output:

Using relationships in Laravel makes interacting with your data easy and fun.
The relationship between hasOne and belongsTo is referred to as a One-to-One
relationship (since each of them has one of the other). If you wish to learn about the other
relationships in depth head on over to http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent-relationships.
Models and relationships are a big part of what makes Laravel amazing. Instead of
creating complex queries and bloated models, we can focus on more the fun stuff and
build our application quicker than ever before.
Next up we are going to talk about mutators, which allow us to manipulate(mutate) data
before it gets entered into or retrieved from the database.

Chapter 7 - Mutators

A zombie developer does not sanitize data when sending or receiving it from their
database, whereas a Laravel developer uses mutators to manipulate data before and after
getting data from the database.
Mutators are our friends, and they will help us defeat the zombie developer apocalypse by
helping us sanitize or manipulate data in our Models.

Mutators
Mutators allow us to change data before sending it to or retrieving it from the database.
When we manipulate data before it gets entered into the database, it is referred to as a
Mutator, when we manipulate data after we retrieve it from the database it is referred to as
an Accessor.
We are going to use a pretty simple example to show you the basics of using mutators.
We will use our zombies table as an example from the previous chapters. Let’s say that
anytime we get a zombie name from the database we want to make sure the name is
capitalized. We could easily do this using an Accessor.
In our Zombie Model from our past examples we would want to add the following
method:
1 public function getNameAttribute($value){
2
return ucwords($value);
3 }

And now any time we get a zombie name from the database it will be capitalized. You will
want to make the name of the function correspond to the name of the database row you
want to change. Since our database row was name our function name is getNameAttribute.
This can be done just as easy using Mutators, except we will modify the data before it gets
put into the database. To add this mutator we would add the following method to our
Zombie model:
1 public function setNameAttribute($value){
2
$this->attributes['name'] = ucwords($value);
3 }

The name would also be capitalized before we saved the data to the database. Our full
zombie model with our Accessor and Mutator methods would look like the following:
1 attributes['name'] = ucwords($value);
}

16 }

Most likely you wouldn’t need the Accessor and Mutator to do the same thing, it would be
a preference as to which one you wanted to use.

From the examples above, if anyone were to enter a zombie name into our database it
would be capitalized. Hopefully, you can see the advantage of using mutators; it makes it
easy to send and retrieve manipulated or formatted data from your database. Just another
awesome functionality to help make our lives as developers easier.
Next up we are going to learn about views. Views are the files that typically contain the
HTML & CSS. In the previous examples we have just been outputting our data from our
routes.php file, but when we want to output data to the screen we will typically use our
views. Let’s move on to the next chapter to learn more.

Chapter 8 - Views

A zombie developer entangles logic and HTML elements in the same page, whereas a
Laravel developer separates their views from their logic.
Zombies are considered to be messy and not too friendly because they write code all over
the place. As a Laravel developer we separate our data output from our data logic. In this
chapter, we’re going to talk about using views. Leveraging the powerful features of
Laravel will help us gain a clear VIEW of what we want to build (sorry for the cheesy
pun).

Views
Views are essentially the HTML and the layout elements of a page. A view is what our
user will see when they visit a page.
So, how might we go about creating a new VIEW for a specified route? Glad you asked,
as it’s very straightforward. Back in Chapter 2, we created a simple route called
‘graveyard’ that printed out a string, which looked like this:
1 









10 

We would get the same functionality as the first view, except when using the view we
would add valid HTML to our page, and this would be the correct way of structuring our
code and displaying data on the screen.
All of your view files will be located inside of the resources/views/directory. Keeping
our files well organized and in proper locations will help us keep our sanity and will make
our jobs and lives much easier.
Now let’s say that we wanted to get all the zombies from our database and pass them to
our view, how might we do this. Simple enough, our route would look like this:
1  Zombie::all());
return view('zombies', $data);

And that would pass all our zombies to a view called zombies.php located in
resources/views/ folder. After creating a new file at resources\views\zombies.php we
could list out our zombies by adding the following code:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14








name; ?>





If we were to open up a web browser and navigate to site.com/zombies we would get an
unordered list of our zombie names, which would look like the following:

To pass data to your views, you can just include all of the variables inside of an array that
gets passed as a second argument in the view function.
return view('zombies', array( 'zombies' => Zombie::all() ));

Using views in Laravel is super easy, and it gets even easier if we choose to use the builtin blade templating engine. What is the blade templating engine? Let’s discuss that next.

Chapter 9 - Blade

A zombie developer’s code has long and combersome syntax, whereas a Laravel
developer’s code contains clean and readable views by using the blade templating engine.
Using Blade Templating in your app will make your views look super clean and easily
readable. Blade templating is optional to use, but after you get the hang of it, you’ll find
yourself wanting to use it over and over again.

Blade
Blade templating is an easy way to render your views in a more readable fashion. Blade
templating is a syntax that you can use in your view files that will then render into valid
PHP code. Let me give you a quick example. Taking the foreach loop from our previous
chapter we have the following code that displayed our zombies in an unordered list:
1 

2

3
name; ?>
4

5 

If we wanted to use blade templating we could re-write that code using blade templating
like so:
1 

2
@foreach($zombies as $zombie)
3
{{ $zombie->name; }}
4
@endforeach
5 

And this makes it so much easier to read and write!
As you can see from the example above instead of doing a foreach and having to open
and close your PHP tags, you can just use the @ symbol. Additionally, when we add
anything inside of {{ }} it will automatically be output to the screen.
The only thing that we need to do to use the blade templating engine is to rename our files
from .php to .blade.php. So, from the example in the previous chapter we created a new
file located at resources\views\zombies.php.
Instead, if we named it resources\views\zombies.blade.php, we could then use blade
templating inside of that file.
Here is another quick example of using blade templating engine. Let’s say that we have
the following code in a blade.php view:
1 
2
The statement is true. variable = 
3 
5 

All this does is print to the screen whether the statement is true or false, and then it
displays the value of the variable. To clean this up using the blade templating engine, it
could be written as follows:
1 @if($var)
2
The statement is true. variable = {{ $var }}
3 @else
4
The statement is false. variable = {{ $var }}
5 @endif

As you can see the above code is much cleaner and easier to read. All thanks to Blade
Templates!
There are many other shorthands that you can use in your blade templates including
layouts, loops, if statements, and much much more.
Be sure to checkout the full documentation on using all the blade shorthand syntax here:
http://laravel.com/docs/blade
Now that we’ve got the hang of how Views work in a Laravel app we are going to move
on to Controllers, which is where most of our functionality for our app will live.
Let’s read on and learn more about controllers.

Chapter 10 - Controllers

A zombie developer does not control situations well since their logic is all over the place,
whereas a Laravel developer uses Controllers to separate their logic from the rest of their
app.
Let’s get control of the situation and add some logic to our app.
Controllers can be looked at as the brains of the operation because this is where all the
logic occurs.

Controllers
Models will get/set data from our database, the View is what’s displayed in the browser,
and the Controller is where the logic happens in our app. Your controllers for your
application will live inside of the app\Http\Controllers folder.
Back in chapter 2, we had a section called ‘Route Closures vs. Route Controller Actions’
where a Route Closure creates an anonymous function, and you put the code directly in
that function. This looks like the following:
1  $zombies);
// Load the view and pass it our data array

9
10 }

return view('zombies', $data);

Simple enough, now inside of our resources\views\zombies.blade.php we will have an
array of zombies stored in a variable called $zombies.
Notice that if we were to create a data array that looked like
$data = array('zombie guys' => $zombies)
variable called $zombie_guys.

we would then have an array of zombies available in a

The last thing we need to do is to display our zombies in our views.
5. Output our zombie data in our view
Inside of our zombie view file located at resources\views\zombies.blade.php we can
add a basic HTML page with an unordered list and loop through each of our zombies like
so:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14







@foreach($zombies as $zombie)
{{ $zombie->name; }}
@endforeach




In the example above we do a simple foreach statement and loop through each of the
zombies and list out their name.
Also, notice that above we are using blade syntax that we covered previously.
There you go! That was a fundamental overview of how each piece will work from your
route, model, controller, and view.
Pretty fun stuff, right!
Now that we have a basic overview of how our app works let’s move on to talking about
an excellent helper tool in Laravel called artisan that will make our lives much easier.

Chapter 12 - Artisan

A zombie developer creates files manually, whereas a Laravel developer uses artisan to
help generate files and functionality for them.
When fighting a zombie would you rather have a shotgun or an axe?
Probably a shotgun, it would make killing zombies much faster and a lot easier. Well, if
there were an easier weapon or tool to use that would make creating your app faster and
easier wouldn’t you want to use it?
That’s exactly what Laravel’s artisan command provides for us.

Artisan
We’ve used the artisan command in previous chapters a handful of times, so you might
have a basic idea of what this command does.
A quick and short definition of artisan is that it is a command line tool that can help
generate files and run php commands.
If you run php artisan in a command prompt, you will see a list of available commands
available to use.
In this chapter, we are only going to go over a few basic commands to get you started.
First let’s talk about how you can create new files.
Making new files with Artisan
Using the php artisan make command we can generate files that we need for our app.
In the last chapter and back in chapter 5 when we needed a new Controller we just created
a new file and started adding our code. Well, instead of manually creating the file we
could have run an artisan command to do this for us:
$

And if we look inside of our App\Http\Controllers folder we will see a new file called
ZombieController.php that has the following code inside of it:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

 \App\Http\Middleware\Authenticate::class,
3
'auth.basic' => \Illuminate\Auth\Middleware\AuthenticateWithBasicAuth::c\
4 lass,
5
'guest' => \App\Http\Middleware\RedirectIfAuthenticated::class,
6
'throttle' => \Illuminate\Routing\Middleware\ThrottleRequests::class,
7
8 ];

'zombie' => \App\Http\Middleware\isNotZombie::class,

Notice above there are already a few middleware routes that come packaged with Laravel.
In fact, we’ll be learning more about the ‘auth’ middleware in the next chapter.
Now, to run our middleware we can create a Middleware Group and add our routes inside:
1 Route::group(['middleware' => ['zombie']], function () {
2
3
4

Route::get('arsenal', function(){
// If the user is not a zombie we can run any code below
});

5
6
7
8 });

Route::get('armory', function(){
// If the user is not a zombie we can run any code below
});

This is great, now any routes that we want to protect against any user that is a zombie can
be wrapped in the zombie middleware group.

Web Middleware
If you looked inside the routes.php of a new Laravel app, you may have noticed that you
already had a middleware group available to you, which was the web middleware:
1 Route::group(['middleware' => ['web']], function () {
2
//
3 });

This middleware will allow you to have access to sessions and certain kinds of security in
your app. All routes in your web app will typically be placed inside of this middleware
group.

Multiple Middleware
We can even nest groups inside of each other. The following will group our routes in the
web and the zombie middleware:
1 Route::group(['middleware' => ['web']], function () {
2
//
3
Route::group(['middleware' => ['zombie']], function () {
4
// Add our routes here
5
});
6 });

Fantastic! But we could make this even more efficient if we want to include both
middlewares in the same group:
1 Route::group(['middleware' => ['web', 'zombie']], function () {
2
// Add our routes here
3 });

You can see that we can add an array of middleware classes in our group, and they will all
be run before we access the specified routes within.

Route Specific Middleware
As an alternative to using Middleware Groups we can add Middleware to each route
specifically, like so:
1 Route::get('arsenal', ['middleware' => 'zombie', function () {
2
//
3 }]);

We could also chain the middleware method to our route definition, like so:
1 Route::get('arsenal', function () {
2
//
3 })->middleware(['first', 'second']);

You can see there are multiple ways to add your middleware and it depends on the way
that works best for you.

Controller Middleware
You could also specify Middleware in a controller.
The methods in that controller will always run the Middleware before running any
method. Let’s say that our routes above linked to a controller method, like so:
Route::get('arsenal', 'WeaponsController@arsenal');
Route::get('armory', 'WeaponsController@armory');

Our above routes will use methods from a WeaponsController. So let’s create that
‘WeaponsController’ by running the following artisan command:
$

And a new file will be created at app\Http\Controllers\WeaponsController.php with
the following contents:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

middleware('zombie');
}

Any WeaponsController method will run through this Middleware before being executed.
This kind of flexibility makes it easy to add functionality between any HTTP request of

any controller.
We could always get by without using middleware in our projects, but after you get the
hang of how to use them it will make your code more flexible, readable, and fun to work
with.
Let’s move on now to Authentication and you’ll see another example of middleware and
how we can protect certain routes from only being accessible to authenticated users.

Chapter 14 - Authentication

A zombie developer spends a few weeks building authentication into their apps, whereas a
Laravel developer uses the built-in feature to add authentication to their app in minutes.
During the zombie developer apocalypse, you will need to be very cautious. Before letting
anyone inside your home you probably need to authenticate that they are not a zombie.
Similarly, when building your app you will most likely need to verify certain users before
allowing them access to certain pages.
This is called authentication and it allows or disallows certain types of users to different
sections of your app.

Authentication
When you login to an account on any website, it is referred to as authentication.
When you build your application in Laravel you will possibly need a way to allow your
users to login to your application. This feature is built-in with Laravel and can be created
in a matter of minutes.
In this chapter we’ll be going over just how easy it is to add authentication to your Laravel
app. Let’s start out with a new laravel application:
$

Then you will need to (change directory) into your new laravel app:
$ cd

Next, we’ll run an artisan command to setup our authentication files.
$

That command will generate a few views, controllers, and routes. If everything went as
planned with that command you will see a message that says Authentication
scaffolding generated successfully!.
Now, we only have a couple more steps to finish our full authentication system in our app.
We need to connect a database to our application and add our users table to the database.
To connect a database to your laravel app you will need to modify a file located in the root
of your directory. This is called the .env file.
If you don’t see this file, then hidden files may not be visible on your machine. Any file that starts with a . is
typically hidden on most machines. If you google How to show hidden files on Mac/Windows, you’ll
find a quick solution that will show hidden files :)

So, open up the .env file and you will see something that looks like the following:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

17
18
19
20
21
22
23

The only part we will be concerned with is the DB_HOST, DB_DATABASE,
DB_USERNAME, and DB_PASSWORD. For each of these variables, we will need to
add in our local database credentials.
If you haven’t already, you will need to create a new database. Let’s say that we called this
database my-first-authentication. We would then need to update our credentials like
so:
1
2
3
4

And above your database username and password will depend on your environment.
Alright, so that’s it as far as connecting our database to our application.
The final step is going to be to add the users table to our database. We are going to do this
by using our artisan helper and another new concept called migrations we’ll go into
further details on migrations in chapter 17.
Let’s run the following command in our command prompt:
$

If all went well you’ll see an output similar to:

And if you checkout your my-first-authentication database you’ll see that you now
have a couple of tables.
One last step. Make sure that all your current routes are wrapped inside of the ‘web’
middleware group we talked about in the previous chapter.
Your routes.php file should look like this:
1  'web'], function () {
4
5
6
7

Route::get('/', function () {
return view('welcome');
});

8

Route::auth();

9
10 });

Route::get('/home', 'HomeController@index');

AND BOOM! THATS IT!
We’ve just added a full authentication system in our laravel up. If you run your laravel app
in a browser you’ll see that you now have a new homepage:

Quick Note: If you don’t have a virtual host (local URL) setup with your laravel app you can always use the
artisan tool to start up a quick server. In the root of your application, you can run php artisan serve and
your app will be available in a browser if you navigate to http://localhost:8000

On your new Laravel homepage you’ll have a few buttons on your navigation. You can
click on the register button and you will have a registration form in front of you:

Go ahead and register for an account and the app should automatically log you in and
redirect you to the homepage. As you can see you now have a dropdown at the top right of
your app that contains your username. If you click on the dropdown you will see a logout
button:

Before you logout let’s go ahead and visit a route at: site.com/home. It will give you a
message that you are currently logged in. Try going up to your username dropdown in the

right hand corner and click the logout button. You will then be redirected back to the main
URL. If you try visiting the /home URL you will no longer be able to access it.
Additionally, to access the login page you can always click on the login button on the top
right.

How great is that? Our full authentication system is already built for us!
Let’s do one last thing to show you how to check if a user is authenticated. Let’s create a
route that will show the current authenticated user profile.
To do this we would create a new route in the ‘web’ middleware group inside of
app\Http\routes.php, which looks like this:
1 Route::get('profile', 'UserController@profile');

So, our ‘profile’ route links to a UserController class that we will need to create at
app\Http\Controllers\UserController.php and that would look like this:
1 ';
4
echo Auth::user()->email;
5
echo '
Logout';
6
} else {
7
return back();
8
}
9 }

In the above code we can use the ‘Auth’ class and all the helpers it provides. So we can
use the following code to check if the user is logged in or not.
Auth::check()

The Auth::check() method will return true if the user is logged in or it will return false if
the user is not logged in.
Another helper method that we used in the code above is the Auth::user() method and
this will return the current logged in user object. We could easily echo out the users email
address by doing this:
$user = Auth::user();
echo $user->email;

Or all in one line we could write it like this:
echo Auth::user()->email;

Make sure to note that we are using the Auth class above. We need to specify that we want
to use the Auth class in this file by adding this to the top of the UserController file:
1  $user);
return view('profile', $data);
} else {
return back();
}
}
}

Inside of our profile() function, if the user is authenticated we get the user object and
pass it in an array of data to a view called profile. So, now we need to create a new view
file located at resources\views\profile.blade.php with the following contents:
1 
2 
3 
4


6 
7


8
{{ Auth::user()->email; }}
9


10 
11 

And the code above will print out a valid HTML page with the similar output from the

screenshot above.
I hope you can see the power of this built-in authentication system and how much time it
will save you in the future. If your app needs an authentication system, you can have this
fully integrated within minutes thanks to Laravel!

Chapter 15 - Requests

A zombie developer doesn’t handle requests efficiently, whereas a Laravel developer uses
the built-in Request class to handle input sanitization and security.
Requests allow our app to receive messages from the client. If these are not handled well
or efficiently it can lead to a deteriorating user experience and could have significant
vulnerabilities.

Requests
Laravel is built on top of PHP, which is a server-side scripting language.
This server side language can accept requests from the client (web browser) such as
submitting a form or even requesting a route URL.
When a user types in a URL in their browser, the browser will then contact or send a
request to the server. So, when data is sent from the browser to the server it is called a
‘Request’.
We used the request object in previous chapters. Back in chapter 4, we used it to capture
the id of a zombie:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

input('id');
Zombie::destroy($id);
});

So, whenever we want to use the Request Class we need to make sure to specify that we
want to use the Illuminate\Http\Request namespace, then we can simply pass the
(Request $request) object as a parameter.
The request class offers us a ton of awesome information including:
The Request URI
The Request Method
The Request Input
The Request Cookies
The Request Files
The Request URI
To get the current request URI we could do the following:
$uri = $request->path();

So, if we tried to access the following route: site.com/zombie/1, the $uri in the above
example would be zombie/1. Another cool thing that we can do is check if we are
currently on a particular route, like this:
1 if ($request->is('zombie/*')) {
2
// we have hit the zombie/{id} route
3 }

Inside of the is method we can use an asterisk * as a wildcard.
If we wanted to fetch the full URL instead we could simply get it like this:

$url = $request->url();

Request Method
Now, let’s say we wanted to figure out what kind of request this is.
Is it a GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE method? Easy peasy, we can do that like this:
$method = $request->method();

Or we could use the isMethod function to check if it is a certain request:
1 if ($request->isMethod('post')) {
2
// we have a post method
3 }

The Request Input
This is the request method that we have used in the previous chapters. This is where we
get input that has been submitted via a form like this:
$zombie_name = $request->input('name');

We could also get all the input data as an array by doing the following:
$input = $request->all();

Finally, we could do a quick check to see if the request has a certain input value:
1 if ($request->has('name')) {
2
//
3 }

The Request Cookies
To retrieve a cookie value from our request we could simply do the following:
$cookie = $request->cookie('name');

The Request Files
We could also use the Request class to retrieve uploaded files like so:
$file = $request->file('name');

And we could check if the request has a file:
1 if ($request->hasFile('name')) {
2
//
3 }

There are a few more request types that are provided by the Laravel Request class. Be sure
to checkout the full documentation (https://laravel.com/docs/requests) to learn more.
So, we just learned all the awesome things that the Request class offers and we know how
our app can accept requests, but what can it do after it gets a request? Well, it can also

send a response. Our application can receive input, and it can also send output. Let’s learn
more about the output that our application can send.

Chapter 16 - Responses

A zombie developer does not respond well to their clients, whereas a Laravel developer
sends clear and concise responses.
When we refer to Responses we are primarily referring to the output that we send to the
client. When our Laravel app receives a request, it can then send a response.

Responses
In the previous chapter, we talked about requests and how our Laravel app can accept
them. In this chapter we are going to go over the Responses our app can send.
When our app get’s a request, it can also return a response.
Here’s a simple example of a response:
1 Route::get('/apocalypse', function () {
2
return 'End of the World!';
3 });

In the example above our laravel app retrieves the Request of a GET method to the
apocolypse route and it simply returns a string as the Response. This is the simplest form
of a response.
So, when we return a response that contains HTML our Laravel app is essentially
returning an HTML document that gets displayed in the users browser.
Attach a Cookie to a Response
In the previous chapter we talked about how your app can retrieve a cookie, now lets see
how we can set a cookie by attaching it to a response. Remember a cookie is stored on the
client side (browser), so when our app sends a response it will need to attach a cookie to
be set by the browser.
We can easily do this by attaching it to the end of a view response like so:
1 Route::get('set_cookie', function(){
2
return response()->view('apocalypse')->withCookie('name', 'value');
3 });

JSON responses
If we wanted to output a JSON response for a particular route we could use the following
syntax:
1 Route::get('json_response', function(){
2
$data = array(
3
4
5
6

'name' => 'Johnny Bullet Holes',
'strength' => 'strong');
return response()->json( $data );

7 });

By running the route above, we get a nice JSON output as the response.
Lastly, we can perform a redirect as a response like so:
1 Route:get('redirect_me', function(){
2
3 });

return redirect('zombie/1');

The route above will redirect to the site.com/zombie/1 route as a response.

It’s pretty straightforward, right? Our application gets requests and sends responses. There
are a few more responses that you may want learn about by checking out the docs here
https://laravel.com/docs/responses.
Next, let’s move on to something exciting called migrations.
Migrations are a way of storing our database schemas in files so they can easily be
versioned, shared, and backed up.

Chapter 17 - Migrations

A zombie developer exports and imports SQL files, whereas a Laravel developer uses
migrations to import and export database schemas.
Exporting and importing SQL files are dead, anyone who performs these actions have
zombie like tendencies.
There is a new way of doing data backup which is called Migrations.

Migrations
If you have ever backed up any of your PHP web apps, you are probably familiar with
performing a MySQL dump backup, which is a dump of all your database data into a
single file. This way when you want to restore your app you have to import all the
database data.
If you are familiar with working on a team and someone adds a new row to the database,
they’ll have to send you over an updated database schema which may conflict with
another modification.
Bleh… It just gets too complicated managing multiple iterations of your database.
Well, thanks to migrations, MySQL dumps will be a thing of the past and sharing your
updated schemas with teammates will be super simple. By using migrations, you can
create files in your app that store the database structure.
If you remember back in chapter 5 we created a zombies table that looked like the
following:
zombies
Field
id
name
strength
health
created_at
updated_at

Type
INT
VARCHAR
VARCHAR
INT
TIMESTAMP
TIMESTAMP

Length
11
50
20
3

Usually to create a database table we would open up phpMyAdmin, Sequel Pro, or some
other kind of sequel application and add each of these rows one at a time.
Alternatively if we are using migrations we can leverage our good ‘ol friend artisan to
help us with this.
Let’s create our first migration using the artisan tool:
$

After running the following command, you will see a new file that has been created inside
your project located in the database\migrations folder, and it probably looks something
like:
XXXX_XX_XX_XXXXXX_create_zombie_table.php,

the X's resemble a datetimestamp.

Make sure to notice that there are already 2 files in this folder which are
*_create_users_table.php and *_create_password_resets_table.php. These are
migrations that come prepackaged with Laravel and are used to create the tables used by
the built-in authentication functionality we discussed in Chapter 14.

Let’s open up our new zombie migration file and you should see something similar to the
following:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

increments('id');
$table->string('name');
$table->string('strength');
$table->tinyInteger('health');
$table->timestamps();
});

Now, if we have an empty database and we were to run the following command:
$

All our migrations will then be run and we should see a few tables inside our database
including the zombies table.

If we were to add the following to our down function:
1 public function down()
2 {
3
Schema::drop('zombies');
4 }

And we run:
$

It will run our down() method and we will no longer see our zombies table in our
database.
Hopefully, you can see the power of migrations. We could easily share a GitHub repo with
another user and they could pull our code down and create a new database. Then they can
run the migrations and they will have the most up-to-date database schema.
There are many other types of functionality you can run in your up and down methods, be
sure to checkout the full documentation on migrations at Laravel’s documentation to learn
more.
Fantastic!
Migrations allow us to save and version our database schema in our project files! What
about the actual data that gets inserted into our database? What if we had some data that
we wanted to seed into our database schema. Simple enough we can do that by using
Seeds.

Chapter 18 - Seeds

A zombie developer imports data into their database with an SQL data dump, whereas a
Laravel developer uses Seeds to input default data into their application.
If you were to build an application that does not have any data, it would look pretty
useless. Luckily we can leverage seeds, which allow us to add default data into our
database schemas. So, when we hand over our app to another developer we can always
make sure there is a little bit of seed data to work with.

Seeds
Laravel allows us to add test data into our application. This is referred to as seeding the
database. In the previous chapter we talked about migrations and in this chapter we will
talk about seeds which is the data stored in our database.
Let’s work off of our previous examples where we had a zombie table in the previous
chapters. Inside of the database we had 2 test zombies that were:
Johnny Bullet Holes
Ted Manwalking
Now if we have the database migration for the zombies table in the previous example we
could hand over our application to another developer and they can run php artisan
migrate and be up and running with the zombies table. Well, what if we also wanted to
include our two zombies in the database?
We can create a Zombie Table Seeder for that.
Let’s go ahead and use our friend artisan again:
$

After running this command we will see a new file has been created inside of
database\seeds\ZombieTableSeeder.php, and the contents of that file will look similar
to the following:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7

 'Johnny Bullet Holes', 'strength' => 'Strong', 'health' =\
5 > 70],
6

['name' => 'Ted Manwalking', 'strength' => 'Weak', 'health' => 90]);

7
8 }

DB::table('zombies')->insert( $zombies );

What we have done is create an array of zombies containing their name, strength, and
health. We then use the DB facade class to insert our zombies into the Zombies table. To
run this seeder we will run the following artisan command:
$ php artisan db:seed

And now if we look in our database we will have our 2 zombies in the Zombies table.
Now we can use version control for our data, so when a new developer pulls a fresh copy
of our app on their computer they will also have the data from our database.
Gone are the days of passing around an .sql file and now are the days of creating
migrations and seeds. This is just another example of how Laravel makes our lives easier.
Let’s move on to learning about the built-in security that laravel provides.

Chapter 19 - Security

A zombie developer doesn’t care about security, whereas a Laravel developer can rest
assure that their app is secure from some of the most common app vulnerabilities.
We want to make sure that no one can hack into our application, and luckily Laravel has
been built to prevent some of the more common ways that users hack into systems.

Security
Security is an important thing when it comes to building applications. Luckily for us, we
have decided to use Laravel which includes security features such as SQL Injection, Cross
Site Scripting, and Cross Site Request Forgery.
Don’t worry if you don’t know much about any of these protections. We’ll explain them
below:
SQL Injection
SQL Injection is when someone tries to hack an input that gets submitted into the
database. Say we were to run a SQL command like so:
1 $weapon_name = $_POST['weapon_name'];
2 $query = 'INSERT INTO weapons VALUES ('1', $weapon_name);

The user could easily enter in a value to the weapon name to Inject SQL into our query.
So, they could potentially run a query and drop a table or a database.
Check out this XKCD.com comic:

Thanks to Laravel and Eloquent we don’t have to worry about SQL injection.
Cross Site Scripting
Cross-site scripting occurs when a hacker adds malicious code in the form of a client side
script. So, pretend you have a comment text area and someone put in the following and
submitted it as a comment:


Now whenever someone visits that page, they will be alerted with this annoying popup.
You can see that this could be dangerous because the user could even redirect that page to
another page.
Thankfully by using the blade templating engine we can output any data and protect
against Cross-site Scripting attacks by using the triple curly brace syntax:
{{{ $user_comment }}}

That output above would be sanitized to prevent any Cross-site Scripting (also referred to
as XSS attack).
Cross-site Request Forgery
Finally, there is another attack called Cross Site Request Forgery that Laravel can prevent
against. This occurs someone modifies a POST/PUT/DELETE request being sent to your
server.
A possible scenario is a hacker who modifies the data being sent by a request from the
browser to the server. The hacker could intercept the request and swap out values, causing
the web application to perform functionality that it normally might not have.
Thankfully, Laravel is here to save the day against CSRF attacks.
When you submit a form you can include a hidden input type with a name of _token and
the value of csrf_token() and Laravel will handle the rest. The form will look similar to
the following:
1 

2
3

4

5 

And Laravel will handle all the rest. If a POST/PUT/DELETE request is submitted and the
security token does not match, the data will not be posted to the application.
Note: To leverage this CSRF protection you will need to use the web middleware group
that we talked about in previous chapters:
1 Route::group(['middleware' => ['web']], function () {
2
// Your routes here will use CSRF protection
3 });

And you can sleep peacefully knowing that your site is safe against any CSRF attacks.
It can get very tiring making sure your app is as secure as possible, but thanks to Laravel
we can focus on what we enjoy most, building our app.

Chapter 20 - Testing

A zombie developer releases code and hopes it doesn’t break, whereas a Laravel developer
writes automated tests to guarantee that new code does not break any functionality in their
app.
Say that you are given a few grenades during the zombie apocalypse and the person giving
you these grenades says, “I think they should work, they’ve been stored away for many
years”. Wouldn’t you rather have them say, “These are our finest top of the line, tested to
blow the roof off of anything grenades”
Yeah, of course you would feel better throwing the grenade into a swarm full of zombies
that you know are tested to work. That’s why testing is so important. We want to guarantee
that our app works in any situation.

Testing
Testing your app is essential for ensuring it works correctly.
I’m sure we’ve all done some testing to some extent. If we open our application, look at
data, or even click a few links then we have tested our application. The only problem with
manual testing is that it can be very time consuming.
Imagine for every line of code you change you have to go back and run through your
whole application to make sure it’s all functioning correctly. That would be absurd, right?
Only a zombie would mindlessly perform these repetitive tasks over and over again.
Lucky for us we can automate our testing by using PHPUnit that is included by default
with a fresh install of Laravel.
Let’s go over an easy example of how testing can help us out. Let’s say that we have a
page with a simple link called ‘Invetory of Weapons’ that would bring us to a page that
says ‘Weapons.’
Well, in that case, we would probably have a view file called artillery.blade.php that
contained the following HTML:
1
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3
4
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9
10












So, this page is loaded when we go to site.com/artillery and when that link is clicked
we go to a page at site.com/weapons, so we would need 2 routes for this, which would
look like the following:
1 Route::get('artillery', function(){
2
return view('artillery');
3 });
4
5 Route::get('weapons', function(){
6
return view('weapons');
7 });

And each of these will load the view. Now, we want to guarantee that anytime we visit the
artillery page we see ‘Inventory of Weapons’ and when we click on the link, we then end
up on the weapons page.
For simplicity sake we will just assume that when you land on the weapons page (located
at resources\views\weapons.blade.php) that it has the text ‘Weapons’ on the page, like
so:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
10










Next, lets create our first test.
$

After running the artisan command above, we will end up with the following code inside
of a new file created at tests\ArtilleryTest.php:
1
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assertTrue(true);
}
}

So, by default, we are given a test example. This test example is just hard-coded to be true.
So, let’s run this test by typing in the following command:
$

After running this command you should see a message in your command line that says
something similar to:
OK (1 test, 1 assertion)

Which means that we have run 1 test and 1 assertion and everything was fine.
Why don’t we go ahead and add a new method to our ArtilleryTest class that looks like the
following:
1 public function testArtilleryPage(){
2
$this->visit('/artillery')
3
->see('Inventory of Weapons')
4
->click('Inventory of Weapons')

5
6 }

->seePageIs('/weapons');

Notice that each function must be prepended with test. Let’s run our test again:
$

And we should see a green success message since we went to the artillery route and
clicked the ‘Inventory of Weapons’ and then landed on the weapons page.
Try changing up the text. Say for instance that the link in the artillery.blade.php file said
‘Inventory of our Weapons’ instead of ‘Inventory of Weapons’. If we run the test again, we
will see a red error message saying that our tests have failed.

You can think of this as a game if you like. When we see green we are currently winning!
But if we see red that means we have a problem and we need to figure out what needs to
be fixed to pass our test.
Just imagine every time we make a modification to our code we could simply run through
our tests and guarantee that we have not broken anything. How much easier would it be to
sleep at night knowing that the code you just pushed didn’t break anything?
This was a very simple example just to give you a quick idea of how tests can work, but
there are many more things that you can test besides user interaction. Be sure to read up
more about Laravel tests on the documentation page. We’ll also provide some awesome
resources you’ll want to check out in the next chapter.

Chapter 21 - Wrapping Up

A zombie developer does not typically read books, whereas a Laravel developer finishes
books they have started and they always continue learning.
It looks like you’re on your way to becoming an awesome Laravel Developer!

Wrapping Up
Whoa! We made it! You just learned the basics of Laravel, and shortly you’ll be on your
way to building the latest and greatest app!
There are so many more fun things to learn about Laravel that we have not included in this
book, so be sure to head over to the Laravel documentation and give it a read.
It’s one of the most enjoyable documentations available. http://laravel.com/docs

Resources
Laravel has quickly become one of the most popular PHP frameworks available today. It
should be no doubt that there are plenty of resources out there that you will want to have
in your back pocket.
Here are some resources that will help you on your way to advancing your Laravel skills:
https://laravel.com/docs (The Laravel Docs)
https://laracasts.com/ (Best Video Resource for Modern PHP and Laravel)
https://laravel-news.com/ (Latest news on Laravel)
https://scotch.io/ (Awesome resource for Laravel Articles)
http://devdojo.com/ (Video resource with Dev & Laravel Screencasts)

Words of Encouragement
Before you set off on your journey to becoming a better PHP developer and leveraging the
powers of Laravel I want to share a bit of wisdom with you.
Having fellow developers around you can help you grow and increase your skills;
however, there may also be other developers who will tell you the way you are doing
things are wrong and that you should be doing things this way or that way.
These kinds of people can distract or discourage you from time to time.
So, my words of encouragement when you encounter people like that is to take what they
have to say with a grain of salt. Many people will help you learn something new, but some
may prevent you from learning something new.
Never be afraid to take chances and to keep pushing the envelope.
My advice is to block out any negativity or discouragement. We are all in this together and
when it comes down to it, there is no right or wrong way to do things. If you have done
something wrong and it has forced you to learn, then that wrong thing was the right thing
to do to get you to your next level.

A New Reality
Using Laravel and bettering your knowledge of development will open up a wide array of
opportunities. A new reality will open up, whether that is to work for yourself one day or
to make some extra money on the side.
Being a web developer is an excellent and exciting career choice. The demand for web
developers is at an all time high.
If you are just starting off in web development, I would like to encourage you to keep on
going! If you have already been doing web development for some time, give yourself a pat
on the back because you’ve made a great choice.
Most people will agree that building or creating something is very gratifying, and as web
developers we get to do just that! We get to take an idea and make it come to life!
The web development world is always evolving and constantly changing, so to continue
growing as a web developer here are some key points that you’ll want to remember: keep
learning, keep encouraging, and keep creating.



---

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