Building an API / JSON based route for searching

In Chapter 6, Adding Angular to Your App we will cover Angular and in there I needed to make an API for the widget to talk to. Let's review that again here in more detail.

Getting ready

A fresh install of Laravel will do.

How to do it...

Follow the steps to build an API / JSON route for searching:

1. Add our controller:

   > php artisan make:controller SearchComics
   

2. Add our route:
   
3. Fill in the controller:
   
4. And in the ComicClientInterface class, I handle the comics method like this. I will go into more details in the How it works… section:
   
5. Show it working at the UI level http://recipes.dev/api/v1/search:
   

   Figure 1 Example of JSON Response from Search

How it works…

First, I will go over what I did above but then I will show another example to simplify it more.

As usual, I made the controller and plugged in the route. Note I use api/v1/ as a route prefix. This just helps me later on do a breaking API change at /api/v2. There are other ways to...