Laravel Basic Routing

Watch "Basic Routing and Views" on Laracasts

For most applications, routes will be defined in the routes/web.php file. Routes defined here may be accessed by entering the defined route's URL in the browser. A standard installation of the Laravel the following route will defined in routes/web.php.

// routes/web.php
Route::get('/', function () {
  return view('welcome');
});

What this route is doing is defining what should displayed when the user visit the web site root or home page. In this case will load the 'welcome' view file. We will discuss view in more detail later on. For now, let break down the route definition.

Route Definition

All routes start with call to the Route class, which is immediately following by a static method. While in most cases, this method will be get, the Route has several available methods, which respond to a specific HTTP request method. The available methods are as follows:

Route::get($uri, $callback);
Route::post($uri, $callback);
Route::put($uri, $callback);
Route::patch($uri, $callback);
Route::delete($uri, $callback);
Route::options($uri, $callback);

Each Route method takes to arguments, a URI, the path the which will be enter in the browser, and a function. The return value of the function will be what will be displayed on the page. This return value could be a simple string, as shown in the following example or it could point to a view file, which will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Route::get('/welcome', function () {
  return 'Hello World'; 
});

Routes to a View

Views are a separate file that contain the HTML that will be displayed on the page. These files can be found in the resources/views directory. Traditionally, views are Blade files (.blade.php), which is Laravel's templating engine. We will discuss views in more details later on in this course.

Routes can be set to point directly to a view. This can be done using the view helper function inside of the callback function. The view helper function is used to retrieve a view instance. It takes the name of the view as its first argument and an optional second argument as the data array.

Route::get('/welcome', function () {
  return view('welcome');
});

Another approach for loading a view is to use the view method of the Route class. The view method accepts a URI as its first argument and a view name as its second argument. In addition, an optional third argument may be used to pass data to the view. We will discuss feature on the next page.

Route::view('/welcome', 'welcome');

Both of the examples above produce the same result.