Laravel Controller: Tutorial with Code Example

Laravel is a popular PHP framework that makes it easy to build web applications. One of the key components of a Laravel application is the controller. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at controllers in Laravel and how they work, with code examples to help illustrate the concepts.

A controller in Laravel is a class that handles HTTP requests and manages the flow of data between the model and the view. Controllers take in data, act on the model, and send a response back to the client.

To create a new controller in Laravel, you can use the php artisan make:controller command. For example, to create a controller called, you would run the following command:

php artisan make:controller TaskController

This will create a new file in the app/Http/Controllers directory called TaskController.php. The file will contain a skeleton controller class with some basic methods.

A basic controller method looks like this:

class TaskController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        // Code to retrieve tasks from the database and pass them to the view
    }
}

The index the method is called when the /tasks route is accessed. It could be used to retrieve a list of tasks from the database and pass them to the view for display.

You can also pass parameters to controller methods. For example, you might have a show the method that takes an id parameter and displays the details for a single task:

class TaskController extends Controller
{
    public function show($id)
    {
        // Code to retrieve a single task from the database and pass it to the view
    }
}

In this case, the show method is called when the /tasks/{id} route is accessed, and the $id parameter is passed to the method, allowing you to retrieve the appropriate task from the database.

You can also use middleware to protect your routes and routes group, for example, if you only want to allow logged in users to access certain routes you can use the auth middleware like this:

class TaskController extends Controller
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->middleware('auth');
    }…