In this article I will show you how to create a simple to-do application using Laravel. Let’s start by creating the project:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel to_do

This will create the project in the directory to_do. You can figure this application to work with homestead (homestead box for vagrant) and serve the application using a virtualization provider like virtualbox. However, we will just use the artisan utility to serve the application.

On your terminal, cd to to_do and issue:

php artisan serve --port 8000

If you point your browser to http://localhost:8000 you will be able to see the default Laravel homepage.

Registration and Login

This is an essential part of almost all web applications. Adding your own registration, login and logout logic is fairly straight forward when you use Laravel. The best thing is that quite often you simply need a simple logic that handles this and Laravel comes with this feature out of the box.

Inorder to enable this you simply need to issue:

php artisan make:auth

That’s it! Laravel will even create necessary views for registration, login, password reset etc.

Database

Laravel supports connecting to different types of databases and you can configure this in .env file. By default it has the following database entries:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

If you wish to use mysql for your application you may want to update the entries accordingly.

For our demo, let’s use sqlite. For this change the entries to:

DB_CONNECTION=sqlite

Now we need to tell laravel where to find the sqlite database. To configure this open config/database.php and you will see:

'sqlite' => [
            'driver' => 'sqlite',
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', database_path('database.sqlite')),
            'prefix' => '',
            ],