Laravel JSON API Demo

This application demonstrates how to use the cloudcreativity/laravel-json-api package to create a JSON API compliant API. This is demonstrated using Eloquent models as the domain records that are serialized in the API, but the package is not Eloquent specific.

Setup

The application uses Homestead, so you'll need Vagrant installed on your local machine.

Once you've cloned this repository, change into the project folder then:

composer install
cp .env.example .env
php vendor/bin/homestead make
vagrant up

Remember you'll need to add an entry for homestead.app in your /etc/hosts file.

Once it is up and running, go to the following address in your browser to see the JSON endpoints:

http://homestead.app/api/v1/posts

To access the web interface:

http://homestead.app

If you use the Vagrant hosts updater plugin, the hostname may be demo-laravel-json-api or similar.

Authentication

Any write requests require an authenticated user. We've installed Laravel Passport for API authentication. You will need to use Personal Access Tokens and the Vagrant provisioning runs the Passport installation command.

To create a token, go to the web interface and login (the username and password fields are completed with credentials that will sign you in successfully). You'll then see the Passport Person Access Token component which you can use to issue tokens.

Once you have a token, send a request as follows, replacing the <api_token> with your token.

POST http://homestead.app/api/v1/posts
Accept: application/vnd.api+json
Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json
Authorization: Bearer <api_token>

{
    "data": {
        "type": "posts",
        "attributes": {
            "slug": "hello-world",
            "title": "Hello World",
            "content": "..."
        }
    }
}

Eloquent vs Not-Eloquent

This package can handle both Eloquent and non-Eloquent records. You get a lot more functionality out of the box if you are using Eloquent, but it's possible to integrate non-Eloquent records as needed.

This demo includes the following JSON-API resources:

Resource	Record	Eloquent?
comments	App\Comment	Yes
posts	App\Post	Yes
sites	App\Site	No
tags	App\Tag	Yes
users	App\User	Yes

Tests

We're big on testing, and the cloudcreativity/laravel-json-api package comes with test helpers to make integration testing a JSON API a breeze. You can see this in action in the tests/Integration folder, where there's a test case for the posts resource.

To run the tests:

vendor/bin/phpunit