Laravel Travel Agency API From Scratch

Time for us to build the first API endpoint. The description from the client looks like this:

A public (no auth) endpoint to get a list of paginated travels. It must return only public travels

So let's transform it into a plan of action for this lesson:

1. New API Controller and Route
2. Return all Travels with Pagination and API Resource
3. Write automated Tests for it with Factories

Controller and Route with Prefix

First, let's generate the Controller:

php artisan make:controller Api/V1/TravelController

As you can see, I immediately add two subfolders:

• /Api, which means we will store all API controllers in there - maybe in the future, there will be separate /Web Controllers
• /V1 is an immediate preparation for versioning: it's a personal habit to create API as v1 right away, with the idea that there may be v2 in the future, which would then land in the /Api/V2 subfolder

For now, we need only one method in the Controller, so we have a choice to make it an Invokable, but I have a feeling that there may be more methods like show() in the future, so let's stick to a typical Route::resource() naming and create an index() method:

app/Http/Controllers/Api/V1/TravelController.php:

namespace App\Http\Controllers\Api\V1;
 
use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use App\Models\Travel;
 
class TravelController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return Travel::where('is_public', true)->get();
    }
}

We also need the Route for that Controller:

routes/api.php:

use App\Http\Controllers\Api\V1\TravelController;
 
// ...
 
Route::get('travels', [TravelController::class, 'index']);

At this point, the endpoint URL would be /api/travels. But I want to use the versioning in the Routes, the same as with namespaces above, to have /api/v1/travels.

We could add this prefix in three different places...