Glossary

Laravel's Artisan is a command-line tool that comes part of every Laravel application, and can be accessed by running php artisan from the root of any Laravel app. Artisan comes with a large list of commands that make it easy to do anything from creating models, controllers, migrating database tables or interacting with a database using the command line interface. In addition to the commands that are already provided, programmers can alsocreate custom commands to simplify the process of interacting with each app from the command line.

Blade is a templating engine provided with Laravel. While we could use plain PHP inside HTML files, the markup up would quickly become messy and hard to read. With Blade we can still loop through data in our views using @for, @foreach, @forelse or @while, echo data by using the mustache syntax {{}}, or display data conditionally by using clear syntax such as @if, @elseif, @else and @unless. Blade also offers many more directives and the ability to build your own, and a robust inheritance system, which make Blade a very powerful, yet easy to understand, templating language.

A practice where developers on a team frequently merge their code changes into a repository they share. Automated tests and builds run on these changes to quickly identify and fix issues, ensuring the software remains stable and can be reliably built and deployed properly.

To protect your application from cross-site request forgery, which is a type of malicious exploit of a website, Laravel generates (and validates) a CSRF token for each upcoming POST request to verify the authenticated user. Simply add @csrf inside your <form> and Laravel will take care of the rest.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is the primary language used in websites to describe the intended visual appearance of the site and its content. For example, it allows the the web browser to determine what size text should be, what color the background of a heading should be, or the spacing between two elements on the page.

Laravel Cashier is a package that provides an easy to use and configurable interface to various billing services, such as Stripe, Paddle or Mollie.

A Laravel Collection is a convenient wrapper around arrays, providing methods for manipulating the array data in useful ways.

Concerns in Laravel are simply a collection of traits – a language feature native to PHP. The term "concerns" comes from the programming design principle "separation of concerns." The authors of Laravel implement this design principle by using traits.

Laravel's core services are defined by a set of PHP interfaces called contracts. Contracts allow you to explicitly define dependencies for your classes. For example, a class that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Mail\Mailer contract is required to provide an implementation for all of the methods needed for sending an email. Each of Laravel's contracts has a corresponding implementation provided by the framework.

Laravel Dusk is a browser automation and API testing package. With Dusk you can programmatically test your Laravel application or visit any website using a real Chrome browser. Dusk can automate repetitive tasks or scrape information from other websites and while Dusk uses a Chrome driver out of the box, you can use any other Selenium compatible drivers instead.

Laravel Echo is a JavaScript library for event broadcasting. It makes it easy to handle authentication, authorization and subscribing to channels and listen for event broadcasts. Because Laravel Echo is a Javascript library, it needs to be installed via NPM package manager.

Eloquent is an object-relational mapper (ORM) that makes interacting with your database a breeze.

Laravel Envoy provides a clear and concise, Blade-like syntax to define common tasks run on remote servers.

Laravel Forge is a server provisioning and management tool for PHP applications. Server provisioning is the process of setting up a server and making it ready to be used. This includes installing and configuring all necessary software and applications, connecting it to middleware, networks and storage and finally deploying the application. Laravel Forge makes this process as well as the management of the server easy and convenient.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the primary language used to represent content on web pages. For example, it allows the the web browser to determine which parts of the content are headings, which parts are paragraph text, and which parts should be formatted as tables.

Laravel provides a large number of global functions called helpers that make some common tasks easier to perform. The list includes methods for working with strings, arrays, objects, URLs and other miscellaneous methods.

Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-set Vagrant box that is pre-configured to serve Laravel applications and mirrors Laravel Forge almost exactly.

Horizon is a dashboard and configuration package for Laravel-powered Redis queues. Redis (RemoteDictionaryServer) is an in-memory key-value store used as a database, cache, and a message broker and Horizon makes it easy to monitor key metrics, for example, the health, performance, failures or history of any queue system in your Laravel application.

Localization is a way to translate a website or web app to different languages, including local currencies and units of measurement. Laravel provides an easy way to retrieve strings in various languages by either using the __ helper function or the @lang Blade directive. Laravel also supports pluralization for languages that have different pluralization rules.

Lumen is a free, API-focused microframework built by Laravel. Its incredible speed makes it one of the fastest microframeworks on the market, and because it is powered by Laravel's components, it is very easy to upgrade your Lumen application to a full Laravel application.

Laravel Nova is an administration dashboard that is known for its great design and the ability to administer the app's database records using Eloquent, the Laravel ORM (Object-Relational Mapping).

Laravel Passport is a package to authenticate APIs. Due to the unique nature of APIs as they typically use tokens to authenticate users and do not maintain session state between requests, authenticating APIs has not always been straightforward. Laravel Passport makes it possible by implementing an OAuth2 server inside your Laravel application.

Redis (RemoteDictionaryServer) is an in-memory key-value store used as a database, cache, and a message broker. It is a no-SQL database, which means it does not use structures such like tables, rows or columns, and it does not use statements such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE. Instead, it uses data structures like strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, hashes, bitmaps and others to store data. Because Redis is an in-memory database (with available persistence options), it is also very fast and therefore ideal for caching, real-time comment streams or queue jobs.

The request lifecycle describes what happens as a request (whether via HTTP or the console) comes into the Laravel application and generates a response, which is returned to the user.

Each request enters the application through public/index.php, where Laravel is bootstrapped and the request is converted to a Request object. This object is passed to the kernel, and then the router, which passes it to the application's matching route closure or controller. These routes will act on the request, and then return a response, which is sent to the end user.

Laravel Scout is a full-text search package that uses an Algolia driver under the hood. However, it is possible to write a custom driver and extend Scout with your own search implementation, which makes Laravel Scout a great solution for any text-search related needs.

Laravel's service container, also known as the Inversion Of Control (IOC) container, Application container or Dependency Injection (DI) container, manages class dependencies and performs dependency injections. A dependency exists whenever one class uses (or depends on) another class or an interface, and it cannot do its work without them. The service container manages these dependencies and makes sure everything works as intended.

Service providers are the heart of every Laravel application. These PHP classes contain and organize the relevant code in which the framework (and dependencies) bootstrap themselves. This includes binding classes, defining event listeners, and registering everything Laravel uses across multiple systems like middleware and routes. Service providers run at the beginning of each request; as the app boostraps Laravel runs through each service provider listend in app/config/app.php. Laravel comes with core service providers, but programmers can also build our own.

Laravel Socialite is a package that makes it easy to set up and use OAuth authentication in a Laravel application.

Spark is a software as a service (SaaS) application scaffolding. Using Spark in your application makes it easy to set up many common features of web applications such as subscriptions, invoices, team billing, user impersonation and many others.

Laravel Telescope is a debug assistant package that allows to debug and monitor various aspects of Laravel application, such as exceptions, notifications, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and others.

Tinker is a REPL (Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop) interactive tool that is included with every Laravel installation. Like Ruby's IRB, Tinker allows programmers to interact with their Laravel application and see the output of their actions.

Vagrant is a software program used to manage and standardize development environments. It's a Ruby-based configuration layer that makes it easy to provision and control hypervisors (VMWare, Parallels, HyperV, etc.) with simple configuration scripts.

Valet is a Laravel development environment for Mac minimalists. Using Homebrew and a few bundled applications, it serves your Laravel projects (and also those in WordPress, Statamic, and more) with almost no configuration on your end.

Laravel Vapor is an auto-scaling, serverless deployment platform developed specifically for Laravel, powered by AWS Lambda.

VueJS is a progressive frontend JavaScript framework for creating user interfaces, the view layer of the application. Its ease of use and a smooth learning curve means that Vue is a popular choice when choosing a front-end framework, so much so that Laravel provides an easy way to install and setup Vue inside Laravel app by running php artisan ui vue or php artisan ui vue --auth.