Create a basic API using Laravel 11

This post is specific to Laravel 11, which has a sightly different way of setting up it's API to previous versions.

Pre-requisites

I'll assume that you have Laravel set up to use laravel commands.

Make sure you have SQLite installed.

Basic Steps

Run:

laravel new basic-test

To question 'Would you like to install a starter kit?', select 'No starter kit'.

To question 'Which testing framework do you prefer?',  select 'Pest'.

To question 'Would you like to initialize a Git repository?', select 'yes'.

To question 'Which database will your application use?', select 'SQLite'.

To question 'Would you like to run the default database migrations?', select 'yes'.

To question 'Would you like to create it?', select 'yes'.

Run:

cd basic-test

Run:

php artisan install:api

Within routes/api.php, add the following lines below the 'use' statements:

Route::get('/', function () {

    return response()->json(['message' => 'Hello World']);

});

Run:

php artisan serve

Open a web browser, and add http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/ to the address bar.

You should see some JSON showing the message 'Hello world'.

PHP, JSON basic example using Topsy Otter

Topsy Otter

Otter API is a RESTful HTTP web service to Topsy. Topsy is a search engine that ranks links, photos and tweets by the number and quality of retweets they receive. The quality of retweets is determined by the influence of the Twitter users.

Below I have used PHP to display results of an Otter call which returns JSON. The results are for the most popular stories on wired.com today.

<?php
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://otter.topsy.com/search.json?q=site:wired.com&window=d"));

foreach ($data as $name => $value)

{

 echo $value->total.'<br />';

 getAllItems($value->list);

}

function getAllItems($iarr)
{
foreach((array)$iarr as $itemName => $itemValue)
{
echo $itemValue->content.'<br />';
}
}
?>

PHP, JSON basic example using delicious

Here is an example of extracting and displaying JSON results through PHP. In this instance, I am using my delicious feed.
Having received the data and decoded it into an array, I like to see the structure of the data. This is where the <pre> tags come in handy. Once you have seen the structure, you know how to traverse and pick out the values you need. Given that the code below is so small, I have commented it.



<?php
/* Get the data and put it into an array */
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/guitarbeerchocolate"));

/* Display the structure of the data so that we know what to extract */
/* Comment out once understood */
echo '<pre>';
print_r($data);
echo '</pre>';

/* Traverse the array, picking out the values you need */
foreach ($data as $name => $value)
{
echo $value->u.'<br />';
echo $value->d.'<br />';
getAllItems($value->t);
echo $value->dt.'<br />';
echo $value->n.'<br />';
echo $value->a.'<br />';
}

/* Some values in this case, tags are themselves arrays so traverse those too */
function getAllItems($iarr)
{
foreach($iarr as $item)
{
echo $item.', ';
}
echo '<br />';
}
?>