Why Laravel Is The Best PHP Framework In 2018

1. Artisan - A Command-Line Interface
2. Migrations & Seeding
3. Blade Template Engine
4. Middleware - HTTP middleware provide a convenient mechanism for filtering HTTP requests entering your application.
5. Eloquent ORM + Built-in Database Query Builder
6. Routing (RESTful routing)
7. Inbuilt packages - Authentication, Cashier, Scheduler, SSH, Socialite
8. Security
9. Unit Testing - Built-in unit testing and simply readable impressive syntax
10. Caching - Laravel provides an expressive, unified API for various caching backends

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Artisan is basically the command line interface in the laravel which helps developers to get rid of all the tedious and time-consuming programming tasks that they need to perform manually.

>> php artisan list 

//This will list all artisan command provided by laravel.

Laravel Framework 5.4.21

Usage:
  command [options] [arguments]

Options:
  -h, --help            Display this help message
  -q, --quiet           Do not output any message
  -V, --version         Display this application version
      --ansi            Force ANSI output
      --no-ansi         Disable ANSI output
  -n, --no-interaction  Do not ask any interactive question
      --env[=ENV]       The environment the command should run under
  -v|vv|vvv, --verbose  Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Available commands:
  clear-compiled       Remove the compiled class file
  down                 Put the application into maintenance mode
  env                  Display the current framework environment
  help                 Displays help for a command
  inspire              Display an inspiring quote
  list                 Lists commands
  migrate              Run the database migrations
  optimize             Optimize the framework for better performance
  serve                Serve the application on the PHP development server
  tinker               Interact with your application
  up                   Bring the application out of maintenance mode
 app
  app:name             Set the application namespace
 auth
  auth:clear-resets    Flush expired password reset tokens
 cache
  cache:clear          Flush the application cache
  cache:forget         Remove an item from the cache
  cache:table          Create a migration for the cache database table
 config
  config:cache         Create a cache file for faster configuration loading
  config:clear         Remove the configuration cache file
 db
  db:seed              Seed the database with records
 event
  event:generate       Generate the missing events and listeners based on registration
 key
  key:generate         Set the application key
 make
  make:auth            Scaffold basic login and registration views and routes
  make:command         Create a new Artisan command
  make:controller      Create a new controller class
  make:event           Create a new event class
  make:job             Create a new job class
  make:listener        Create a new event listener class
  make:mail            Create a new email class
  make:middleware      Create a new middleware class
  make:migration       Create a new migration file
  make:model           Create a new Eloquent model class
  make:notification    Create a new notification class
  make:policy          Create a new policy class
  make:provider        Create a new service provider class
  make:request         Create a new form request class
  make:seeder          Create a new seeder class
  make:test            Create a new test class
 migrate
  migrate:install      Create the migration repository
  migrate:refresh      Reset and re-run all migrations
  migrate:reset        Rollback all database migrations
  migrate:rollback     Rollback the last database migration
  migrate:status       Show the status of each migration
 notifications
  notifications:table  Create a migration for the notifications table
 queue
  queue:failed         List all of the failed queue jobs
  queue:failed-table   Create a migration for the failed queue jobs database table
  queue:flush          Flush all of the failed queue jobs
  queue:forget         Delete a failed queue job
  queue:listen         Listen to a given queue
  queue:restart        Restart queue worker daemons after their current job
  queue:retry          Retry a failed queue job
  queue:table          Create a migration for the queue jobs database table
  queue:work           Start processing jobs on the queue as a daemon
 route
  route:cache          Create a route cache file for faster route registration
  route:clear          Remove the route cache file
  route:list           List all registered routes
 schedule
  schedule:run         Run the scheduled commands
 session
  session:table        Create a migration for the session database table
 storage
  storage:link         Create a symbolic link from "public/storage" to "storage/app/public"
 vendor
  vendor:publish       Publish any publishable assets from vendor packages
 view
  view:clear           Clear all compiled view files

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• Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing your team to easily modify and share the application's database schema.
• Migrations are typically paired with Laravel's schema builder to easily build your application's database schema.
• If you have ever had to tell a teammate to manually add a column to their local database schema, you've faced the problem that database migrations solve.

The Laravel Schema facade provides database agnostic support for creating and manipulating tables across all of Laravel's supported database systems.

To create a migration use following artisan command: Create a migration for users table

php artisan make:migration create_users_table

//OR

php artisan make:migration create_users_table --table=users

//OR

php artisan make:migration create_users_table --create=users

The new migration will be placed in your database/migrations directory

Note: Run specific migration in laravel -

php artisan migrate --path=/database/migrations/my_migration_file

• Blade is the simple, yet powerful templating engine provided with Laravel. Unlike other popular PHP templating engines, Blade does not restrict you from using plain PHP code in your views. In fact, all Blade views are compiled into plain PHP code and cached until they are modified, meaning Blade adds essentially zero overhead to your application.
• Blade view files use the .blade.php file extension and are typically stored in the resources/views directory.
• See in details on laravel official website

Middleware provide a convenient mechanism for filtering HTTP requests entering your application.

For example, Laravel includes a middleware that verifies the user of your application is authenticated. If the user is not authenticated, the middleware will redirect the user to the login screen. However, if the user is authenticated, the middleware will allow the request to proceed further into the application.

Of course, additional middleware can be written to perform a variety of tasks besides authentication. A CORS middleware might be responsible for adding the proper headers to all responses leaving your application. A logging middleware might log all incoming requests to your application.

There are several middleware included in the Laravel framework, including middleware for authentication and CSRF protection.

All of these middleware are located in the app/Http/Middleware directory.

To create a middleware use following artisan command:
>> php artisan make:middleware CustomMiddleware
//Note- CustomMiddleware is the name of the middleware

Laravel comes with a beautiful eloquent ORM which provides a simple ActiveRecord implementation for working with your database. Each database table comprises of a Model which is basically used to interact with that table. Routing won’t be difficult with Laravel and thus, you can easily approach routing. You can easily trigger route in the application with good flexibility and control to match the URL.

Authentication, Cashier, Scheduler, SSH, Socialite etc

Authentication is an imperative part of any web application and thus, web developers invest a chunk of time in writing the authentication code. In Laravel 5, authentication has become simpler and easy for the developers. Laravel extensively takes care of the security. It uses a salted and hashed password and thus, the password will never save as the plain text in your database. Laravel also uses bcrypt hashing algorithm in order to generate an encrypted representation of a password. The security features that Laravel offers are: ( Laravel helps you to protect your application from Cross-site forgery attacks. In cross-site forgeries unauthorized commands are performed on behalf of an authenticated user.) (Passport) [ Laravel protects API authentication by using laravel passport which provides a full Oauth2 server implementation for your application] (Laravel also provides gates protection. Gates are closures which determine if a user is authorized to perform a given action or not) Caching is a temporary data storage place where you can stockpile data and can retrieve it as per your need. It will lessen your time when you need to access your database or other remote services. This tool keeps your application fast and responsive. Basically, Laravel is built with unit testing in mind. Support for testing with PHPUnit is included out of the box, and a phpunit.xml file is already set up for your application.

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Easy to Maintain: Laravel follows a module structure and thus, you can easily maintain it. A laravel website requires the only minimal level of maintenance.

Rapid and Secure: Laravel speeds up your web development process and thus, it is considered the rapid development PHP framework. Laravel comes up with an array of secure authentication tools, so Laravel is a very secured framework.

Task Scheduling: In earlier, you need to generate Cron entry for each task that you need to schedule on your server. But Laravel provides you with the scheduler command which allows you to define your command schedule within Laravel itself.

Queues: Laravel queues provide you with a unified API across different queue backends like Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, Redis , etc. Queues help you in deferring time-consuming tasks like sending an email, and many more things. Since your time-consuming tasks are deferred, this will speed up your web requests to your application.

Events: Laravel events give you a simple observer implementation. This feature helps you to subscribe and listen to events in your application.

Broadcasting: WebSockets are used for real-time implementation, live updates, etc. Laravel makes it simple for you to broadcast your events over a WebSocket connection. By broadcasting your laravel events, you can share the same events name between your server-side code and client-side JavaScript application.

Notifications: Along with providing support for sending e-mail, Laravel provides you support for sending notifications in other channels also like SMS and Slack. Notifications can be stored in your database so that you can display them in your web interface.

Automatic Pagination: Laravel possesses automatic pagination which simplifies the task of implementation paginations. With laravel, you don’t need to use manual implementation.

Multiple File System: Laravel uses third-party package Flysystem to provide multiple file support for the developers. You can use any Local or Cloud-based storage in order to provide simple configuration.

Automatic Package Discovery: In earlier versions of Laravel, you can easily install packages. But Laravel 5.6 comes with a new feature called Automatic Package Discovery which detects the packages automatically which users want to install on their devices. Laravel 5.6 allows developers to disable this feature for some specific packages.

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