Your First Laravel Route and Controller: A Beginner’s Guide

PHP

When you’re starting with Laravel, one of the first concepts you’ll encounter is routes and controllers. These two building blocks form the foundation of any Laravel application. Understanding how they work will help you set up a basic web application and give you the ability to manage the flow of your app.

Let’s dive into the basics of routes and controllers in Laravel by creating your first route and controller.

What is a Route in Laravel?

In Laravel, a route is a way to define how an HTTP request (like a page request) should be handled by the application. Routes direct incoming requests to appropriate controllers or closures to return a response.

In a typical Laravel application, routes are defined in files located in the routes directory. The web.php file is where you’ll define most of the routes for web-based requests.

Routes are essentially like a map, allowing Laravel to know which controller and action to run when a user accesses a specific URL.

Creating Your First Route in web.php

Let’s start by creating a basic route. Laravel’s routes/web.php file is where you define the routes for your application.

1. Open the web.php file located in the routes directory.
2. Inside this file, you can define your first route. Here’s an example:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

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

In this example:

• Route::get('/welcome', ...) is defining a route that listens for a GET request to the /welcome URL.
• The closure (function () { return view('welcome'); }) is executed when the route is hit, and it returns the welcome view.

Now, if you visit http://localhost/welcome in your browser, it should display the Laravel welcome page.

Introducing Controllers in Laravel

While closures are simple and effective, controllers are more powerful and scalable, especially for larger applications. A controller is a class that…