Building the Baseline Backend Application

Now, we will start building the baseline of our application. In this chapter, we are going to create a Laravel application using the RESTful architecture. As we saw in the previous chapter, Laravel will provide us with the necessary infrastructure to build a solid and scalable application.

We will take a closer look at some points that we mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, Understanding the Core Concepts of Laravel 5, such as using Docker containers to configure our environment, and also how to keep our database always populated, even by using the MySQL Docker container.

As we mentioned before, it is entirely possible to use a different configuration for your development environment, and we mentioned some ways in Chapter 1, Understanding the Core Concepts of Laravel 5. However, we strongly recommend that you use Docker.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Additional notes about Laravel with Docker
• Using PHP Composer to scaffold a Laravel application
• Setting up a MySQL database
• Migrations and database seed
• API documentation with the Swagger framework