Building a RESTful API with routes

A common need for a modern web application is having an API that third-parties can run queries against. Since Laravel is built with RESTful patterns as a focus, it's quite easy to build a full API with very little work.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need a standard Laravel installation with a properly configured MySQL database tied into our application.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

1. Open the command line, go to the root directory of the Laravel installation, and create a migration for our table using the following:

   php artisan migrate:make create_shows_table

2. In the app/database/migrations directory, find the file similar to 2012_12_01_222821_create_shows_table.php and create the schema for our table as follows:

   <?php
   
   use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
   
   class CreateShowsTable extends Migration {
   
     /**
      * Run the migrations.
      *
      * @return void
      */
     public function up()
     {
       Schema::create('shows', function...