APIs power every modern mobile app and SPA. This tutorial walks through building a production-ready REST API with Laravel 11 and Sanctum.
Project Setup
composer create-project laravel/laravel my-api
cd my-api
composer require laravel/sanctum
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Sanctum\SanctumServiceProvider"Authentication Routes
We use Sanctum token auth for stateless API requests. Users log in via POST /api/auth/login and receive a Bearer token for subsequent requests.
Resource Controllers
Laravel resource controllers give you seven standard actions (index, create, store, show, edit, update, destroy) mapped to HTTP verbs — perfect for RESTful APIs.
Form Request Validation
Move validation logic out of controllers into dedicated Form Request classes for clean, testable code.