Building APIs with Laravel even faster
Laravel is now quite a popular framework and its trending even more after the release of version 11. If you are planning to build an api for your mobile app or an web-app still there are so many things that you are needed to consider.
In this post let’s see how we can create a single api endpoint eg. customer which can all the basic things that are needed.
Laravel already has an artisan command to do this. Running a single command with create an entire list of files that you need to start with creating an endpoint.
php artisan make:model Customer --all --apiThis will create a model, Factory, Create and Update Request, Controller and a policy as well. But even after this let’s say if you want to store the data to the model you need to update the code every time when you run this command.
Here we are going to find a workaround for this and make things faster.
Modifying Laravel Stubs
You might have already known that in Laravel all the files that are generated using commands are basically dependent on the files called stubs. These files have like basic framework of how the files needs to have a generate code when they are ready to be integrated.
If you wish to see all the stubs files that are available in Laravel you can run
$ php artisan stub:publish
$ git add stubs
$ git status
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file: stubs/cast.stub
new file: stubs/console.stub
new file: stubs/controller.api.stub
new file: stubs/controller.invokable.stub
new file: stubs/controller.model.api.stub
new file: stubs/controller.model.stub
new file: stubs/controller.nested.api.stub
new file: stubs/controller.nested.stub
new file: stubs/controller.plain.stub
new file: stubs/controller.stub
new file: stubs/factory.stub
new file: stubs/job.queued.stub
new file: stubs/job.stub
new file: stubs/middleware.stub
new file: stubs/migration.create.stub
new file: stubs/migration.stub
new file: stubs/migration.update.stub
new file: stubs/model.pivot.stub
new file: stubs/model.stub
new file: stubs/observer.plain.stub
new file: stubs/observer.stub
new file: stubs/policy.plain.stub
new file: stubs/policy.stub
new file: stubs/request.stub
new file: stubs/resource-collection.stub
new file: stubs/resource.stub
new file: stubs/rule.stub
new file: stubs/seeder.stub
new file: stubs/test.stub
new file: stubs/test.unit.stub
You can customize this to automatically apply your modifications each time you run an artisan make command.
Our goal here is not to modify the entire stubs. But start with some basic changes which can speed up the entire process.
Here in this post we are going to modify only the stubs/controller.model.api.stub.
We are going to add functionalities like pagination for the index route and all other basic CRUD actions.
To implement pagination in the index api we will use Spatie’s Query Builder Library.
So to install it use the composer command.
composer require spatie/laravel-query-builderNow let’s modify the controller.model.api.stub file to have pagination with query builder automatically.
<?php
namespace {{ namespace }};
use {{ namespacedModel }};
use {{ rootNamespace }}Http\Controllers\Controller;
use {{ namespacedRequests }}
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse;
use Spatie\QueryBuilder\QueryBuilder;
class {{ class }} extends Controller
{
/**
* Display a listing of the resource.
*/
public function index(Request $request): JsonResponse
{
$model = QueryBuilder::for({{ model }}::class)
->allowedSorts(['id', 'created_at']);
return response()->json($model->paginate(perPage: $request->perPage()));
}
/**
* Store a newly created resource in storage.
*/
public function store({{ storeRequest }} $request): JsonResponse
{
return response()->json({{ model }}::create($request->validated()));
}
/**
* Display the specified resource.
*/
public function show({{ model }} ${{ modelVariable }}): JsonResponse
{
return response()->json(${{ modelVariable }});
}
/**
* Update the specified resource in storage.
*/
public function update({{ updateRequest }} $request, {{ model }} ${{ modelVariable }}): JsonResponse
{
$data = tap(${{ modelVariable }},fn($model) => $model->update($request->validated()));
return response()->json($data);
}
/**
* Remove the specified resource from storage.
*/
public function destroy({{ model }} ${{ modelVariable }}):JsonResponse
{
${{ modelVariable }}->delete();
return response()->json('Item deleted');
}
}
Output
Now when you run the composer command
php artisan make:model Customer --all --apiThe controller output would be something like
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\Http\Requests\StoreCustomerRequest;
use App\Http\Requests\UpdateCustomerRequest;
use App\Models\Customer;
use Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Spatie\QueryBuilder\QueryBuilder;
class CustomerController extends Controller
{
/**
* Display a listing of the resource.
*/
public function index(Request $request): JsonResponse
{
$model = QueryBuilder::for(Customer::class)
->allowedSorts(['id', 'created_at']);
return response()->json($model->paginate(perPage: $request->perPage()));
}
/**
* Store a newly created resource in storage.
*/
public function store(StoreCustomerRequest $request): JsonResponse
{
return response()->json(Customer::create($request->validated()));
}
/**
* Display the specified resource.
*/
public function show(Customer $customer): JsonResponse
{
return response()->json($customer);
}
/**
* Update the specified resource in storage.
*/
public function update(UpdateCustomerRequest $request, Customer $customer): JsonResponse
{
$data = tap($customer,fn($model) => $model->update($request->validated()));
return response()->json($data);
}
/**
* Remove the specified resource from storage.
*/
public function destroy(Customer $customer):JsonResponse
{
$customer->delete();
return response()->json('Item deleted');
}
}
Bonus Tips
If you see the above code I have added something like $request->perPage() which is not available by default in Laravel. This can be added by using something called macros.
In our code we are going to add this macro for Request Class in Laravel
/**
* So we can consistently get a perPage value from data tables.
*
* @param int|null|string $default = null This should only be provided as 'all' if a string is given
*
* @return callable|int|null|string
*/
Request::macro(
name: 'perPage',
macro: function (int|null|string $default = null) {
/** @var Request $this */
$perPage = $this->get('perPage');
/**
* If we provide a default value which isn't valid we should convert to null to prevent errors
* This is any value which is a string but not all.
*/
$default = is_string($default) && $default !== 'all'
? null
: $default;
/**
* The eloquent builder paginate method accepts `int|null|\Closure`
* It already calculates the total number of records before generating the links
* So to get an accurate 'all' pagination option we should return a callback which will be passed that total.
*
* @see \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder
*/
if ($perPage === 'all') {
return fn (int $total) => $total;
}
//If the perPage value is an integer at this point we should use it otherwise provide the default
//Casting a non-int will return 0 and we should also not accept 0 items per page
//as providing a non-integer or non-null value here would cause an exception
return (int) $this->get('perPage') !== 0
? $this->get('perPage')
: $default;
}
);
Add this to your boot method of your AppServiceProvider in Laravel. The code itself looks kind of self explanatory. So have a look and play around with the code.
Don’t forget to add the import of use Illuminate\Http\Request; in the top of AppServiceProvider.
That’s all. This is a very basic example of how we can add speed up building an API by modifying just only one file.
I will be sharing more changes to this code idea in the repo Laravel API Boilerplate which you can fork anytime and use for your project.
PS: Image Courtesy - ChatGPT