How to connect Laravel

Learn how to connect Laravel to your project with a step-by-step installation guide and example code.

Connecting Laravel

Laravel is a powerful and user-friendly PHP framework that can help you create amazing web applications. It provides a simple and expressive syntax, allowing developers to quickly create robust applications. Laravel also includes a powerful Eloquent ORM, allowing developers to easily query and manipulate data from the database.

In order to connect to a database with Laravel, you will need to set up a connection in the config/database.php file. This file is used to define the database connection settings. The settings are stored in an array, and you can choose which database connection to use by setting the 'default' key to the name of the connection, as seen below:

'connections' => [

    'mysql' => [
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'host' => env('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
        'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
        'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
        'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
        'charset' => 'utf8',
        'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
        'prefix' => '',
        'strict' => true,
        'engine' => null,
    ],

    'default' => env('DB_CONNECTION', 'mysql'),
],

The 'default' setting tells Laravel which connection to use when performing database operations. The other values in the array define the settings for each connection type. In this example, the 'mysql' connection is used, which is a basic MySQL connection.

Once the connection is defined, you can use the Eloquent ORM to query and manipulate data in the database. Eloquent provides a simple and expressive syntax, allowing developers to quickly create and execute database queries. Eloquent also provides several other features such as relationships, eager loading, and soft deletes.

For example, here is a simple query to retrieve all records from a table:

$results = User::all();

Eloquent also provides a simple way to perform insert, update, and delete operations. Here is an example of an insert query:

$user = new User;
$user->name = 'John Doe';
$user->save();

With all of these features, Laravel makes it easy for developers to quickly create powerful web applications. By connecting to a database with Laravel, developers can quickly query and manipulate data, allowing them to quickly create powerful applications.