This is my very first Laravel app, made in 1 week of learning.

Refer to the Wiki to get started, or keep reading to know more about the project's content.

• TL;DR
• Tech stack
• Exercise
  • Context
  • Task
• Solution
• Learnings & Next steps

TL;DR

In short, this project is an API made with Laravel and a bunch of packages. It provides, for a fictive eshop:

• user authentication
• adding/removing products to/from a user's basket
• generating CSV files containing basket removal statistics.

Tech stack

• The Laravel framework with its local environment using Laravel Sail and customised Docker Compose (I added phpMyAdmin).
• Extra information on the local environment with Laravel Telescope.
• Testing with PHPUnit.
• Static analysis with PHPStan (Larastan) on max level.
• Coding standards enforcement with PHP-CS-Fixer.
• A REST JSON API.
• A GitHub Actions workflow that runs PHPStan and PHPUnit.
• Swagger and Wiki documentation.

Exercise

Context

You're part of a team working on an eshop's backend API that handles (among other things):

• adding and removing products to a customer's basket
• checking out that basket
• and restricting these actions to the authenticated user the basket belongs to.

The sales team wants to know what products were added to a basket, but removed before checkout. They also want to dig into why on a regular basis using a spreadsheet tool such as Excel or Google Sheets.

Note that a product is either sold or lost, never both. If a product is added to the basket, then removed, then added again, it doesn't count as a loss anymore.

Task

Your job is to create an endpoint that:

• enables the sales team to get this data (i.e. the product removals)
• supports filters (e.g. in the last 30 days) so users don't have to download the whole thing each time
• returns a CSV file compatible with their spreadsheets
• is only accessible to internal users (i.e. the employees of the sales team).

You're expected to do a good job, i.e. produce code and documentation that is clean, stable, and supports teamwork.

Solution

I created 4 endpoints to set the scene:

1. sign-up enables the eshop to register a new user.
2. sign-in enables the eshop to log in a user.
3. remove-item enables the eshop to remove an item from a basket.
4. add-item enables the eshop to add an item to a basket.

To deliver the new feature, I added functionality to 3 & 4 and created the 5th endpoint :

3. remove-item now marks a product as lost, rather than actually taking it out of the basket.
4. add-item now either adds a new product or, if it was previously added then removed, simply "un-looses" it.
5. download-losses provides information about the losses. It supports filters and triggers a CSV file download directly in the browser.

I also used factories and seeders to generate sample data to play with.

Finally, I added various packages to:

• document these endpoints, with their success/error responses and potential payloads (Swagger)
• run tests (PHPUnit) and static analysis (PHPStan)
• enforce coding standards (PHP-CS-Fixer)
• provide local requests insights for debugging (Telescope)
• enable a CI pipeline (GitHub Actions).

Note that this reflects the thought process, not the actual implementation steps. For those, please refer to the commit history.

Learnings & Next steps

With these first steps with Laravel, I learned about:

• models
• migrations
• factories
• seeders
• routes
• middlewares
• controllers
• authentication (sanctum)
• adding packages
• Sail configuration
• tests.

Next, I want to find out about:

• error handling using form requests, validation routines, and exceptions
• API resources for forming JSON responses
• file storage
• header-based API versioning
• querying the database with Eloquent
• using factories to build test payloads
• overall, splitting up the logic more instead of having it all in the controllers.