orchestral / quickstart-basic

Orchestra Platform QuickStart Basic

Basic Task List

• Introduction
• Installation
• Prepping The Database
  • Database Migrations
  • Eloquent Models
• Routing
  • Stubbing The Routes
  • Displaying A View
• Building Layouts & Views
  • Defining The Layout
  • Defining The Child View
• Adding Tasks
  • Validation
  • Creating The Task
  • Displaying Existing Tasks
• Deleting Tasks
  • Adding The Delete Button
  • Deleting The Task

Introduction

This quickstart guide provides a basic introduction to the Orchestra Platform and includes content on database migrations, the Eloquent ORM, routing, validation, views, and Blade templates. This is a great starting point if you are brand new to the Orchestra Platform, Laravel framework or PHP frameworks in general. If you have already used Laravel or other PHP frameworks, you may wish to consult one of our more advanced quickstarts.

To sample a basic selection of Laravel features, we will build a simple task list we can use to track all of the tasks we want to accomplish (the typical "to-do list" example). The complete, finished source code for this project is available on GitHub.

Installation

Of course, first you will need a fresh installation of the Orchestra Platform. You may use the Homestead virtual machine or the local PHP environment of your choice to run the framework. Once your local environment is ready, you may install the Laravel framework using Composer:

composer create-project orchestra/platform quickstart --prefer-dist

You're free to just read along for the remainder of this quickstart; however, if you would like to download the source code for this quickstart and run it on your local machine, you may clone its Git repository and install its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/orchestral/quickstart-basic quickstart
cd quickstart
composer run-script post-root-package-install
composer install
php artisan key:generate

For more complete documentation on building a local Orchestra Platform development environment, check out the full Homestead and installation documentation.

Prepping The Database

Database Migrations

First, let's use a migration to define a database table to hold all of our tasks. Laravel's database migrations provide an easy way to define your database table structure and modifications using fluent, expressive PHP code. Instead of telling your team members to manually add columns to their local copy of the database, your teammates can simply run the migrations you push into source control.

So, let's build a database table that will hold all of our tasks. The Artisan CLI can be used to generate a variety of classes and will save you a lot of typing as you build your Laravel projects. In this case, let's use the make:migration command to generate a new database migration for our tasks table:

php artisan make:migration create_tasks_table --create=tasks

The migration will be placed in the resources/database/migrations directory of your project. As you may have noticed, the make:migration command already added an auto-incrementing ID and timestamps to the migration file. Let's edit this file and add an additional string column for the name of our tasks:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateTasksTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('tasks', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('name');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('tasks');
    }
}

To run our migration, we will use the migrate Artisan command. If you are using Homestead, you should run this command from within your virtual machine, since your host machine will not have direct access to the database:

php artisan migrate

This command will create all of our database tables. If you inspect the database tables using the database client of your choice, you should see a new tasks table which contains the columns defined in our migration. Next, we're ready to define an Eloquent ORM model for our tasks!

Eloquent Models

Eloquent is Laravel's default ORM (object-relational mapper). Eloquent makes it painless to retrieve and store data in your database using clearly defined "models". Usually, each Eloquent model corresponds directly with a single database table.

So, let's define a Task model that corresponds to our tasks database table we just created. Again, we can use an Artisan command to generate this model. In this case, we'll use the make:model command:

php artisan make:model Task

The model will be placed in the app directory of your application. By default, the model class is empty. We do not have to explicitly tell the Eloquent model which table it corresponds to because it will assume the database table is the plural form of the model name. So, in this case, the Task model is assumed to correspond with the tasks database table. Here is what our empty model should look like:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Task extends Model
{
    //
}

We'll learn more about how to use Eloquent models as we add routes to our application. Of course, feel free to consult the complete Eloquent documentation for more information.

Routing

Stubbing The Routes

Next, we're ready to add a few routes to our application. Routes are used to point URLs to controllers or anonymous functions that should be executed when a user accesses a given page. By default, all Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file that is included in every new project.

For this application, we know we will need at least three routes: a route to display a list of all of our tasks, a route to add new tasks, and a route to delete existing tasks. So, let's stub all of these routes in the app/Http/routes.php file:

<?php

use App\Task;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

/**
 * Display All Tasks
 */
Route::get('/', function () {
    //
});

/**
 * Add A New Task
 */
Route::post('task', function (Request $request) {
    //
});

/**
 * Delete An Existing Task
 */
Route::delete('task/{id}', function ($id) {
    //
});