What is Laravel

An overview of Laravel, its features, and why you should choose Laravel.

What is Laravel

Laravel is a PHP web application framework with expressive and elegant syntax. A framework provides structure and a starting point for building applications, allowing you to focus on creating something amazing without worrying about the details of implementation.

Laravel strives to provide an amazing developer experience while offering powerful features. It includes many features such as dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, and unit and integration testing.

Whether you’re new to PHP web frameworks or have years of experience, Laravel is a framework that can grow with you.

Why use Laravel

A progressive framework

Laravel is a “progressive” framework. When you’re taking your first steps in web development, extensive documentation, guides, and video tutorials support your learning without overwhelming you.

For senior developers, Laravel provides robust tools such as dependency injection, unit testing, queues, and real-time events.

A scalable framework

Laravel is highly scalable. Thanks to PHP’s scaling characteristics and support for fast distributed cache systems like Redis, horizontal scaling with Laravel is easy. In fact, Laravel applications have easily been scaled to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.

An AI-friendly framework

Laravel’s conventions and well-defined structure make it ideal for AI-assisted development using tools such as Cursor and Claude Code. When you tell an AI agent to add a controller or migration, it knows exactly where to place it.

A community-driven framework

Thousands of talented developers around the world contribute to the framework. By combining the finest packages in the PHP ecosystem, Laravel delivers the most robust and developer-friendly framework available.

Key features of Laravel

Eloquent ORM

Perform database operations through an intuitive object-oriented interface. Define a model class for each table and use those models to manipulate data.

Blade templating engine

A simple yet powerful templating engine. You can use PHP code without restrictions, while convenient directives boost productivity.

Artisan command line

The php artisan command automates many operations, such as generating controllers and models, running migrations, and clearing caches.

Authentication and authorization

User authentication is built into the framework, and with starter kits you can build login functionality in minutes.

Testing

Unit and feature testing with Pest or PHPUnit is supported out of the box.

Next steps

Installation

Install PHP and Laravel and create your first project.