API Platform for Laravel

Last updated on October 14th, 2024 by Paul Redmond

The API Platform is the easiest way to create state-of-the-art web APIs using Symfony or Laravel:

API Platform is a set of tools for building modern web projects. It is a framework for API-first projects built on top of Symfony components. Like other modern frameworks such as Laravel and Symfony, it’s both a full-stack all-in-one framework and a set of independent PHP components and bundles that can be used separately.

Main Features

Expose your Eloquent models in minutes as a REST API or GraphQL API
Or both at the same time, with the same code!
Automatically expose an OpenAPI specification, dynamically generated from your Eloquent models and always up-to-date
Automatic CRUD
Automatically expose nice UIs and playgrounds to develop using your API
Automatically paginate collections
Add validation logic using Laravel Form Request Validation
API Platform is compatible with Laravel's authorization system - add authorization logic using gates and policies
Add filtering logic
Benefits from the API Platform JavaScript tools: admin and create client
And more...

Here are a few examples from the documentation of how you can expose your Eloquent models to enable validation, query parameters, filtering, authentication, and more.

First, here's an example of how you can use API Platform with Laravel Sanctum to add a middleware to secure routes:

// app/Models/Book.php
 
use ApiPlatform\Metadata\Patch;
 
#[Patch(middleware: 'auth:sanctum')]
class Book extends Model
{
}

Next, here's an example of using API Platform's integration for exposing an Eloquent model as an API resource with validation rules:

// app/Models/Book.php
 
use ApiPlatform\Metadata\ApiResource;
 
#[ApiResource(
    rules: [
        'title' => 'required',
    ]
)]
class Book extends Model
{
}

To get started with API Platform and Laravel, read the documentation for installing Laravel and the API platform. Specifically, Installing the API Platform docs will walk you through setting up API platform on a new Laravel project, creating your first model, using DTOs, and more. You don't have to start a new project to use API Platform with Laravel, you can add it to your existing app as well.