Basic Controllers

What is controller?

Controller is a class which is associated to one or more routes and is responsible for handling requests of that routes. Generally controller is for grouping similar routes together. For example: ProductController should contain only logic associated to products, but not anything else. CarController should not contain logic that is not associated to cars.

Generate controller with artisan

php artisan make:controller CarController

CarController.php class was generated in app/Http/Controllers folder. This is the default content of the just generated controller in Laravel 11.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class CarController extends Controller
{
    //
}

Create route and associate action

Now let’s open CarController and add method index, so that our controller looks like this..

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class CarController extends Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return "Index method from CarController";
    }
}

Now let’s open routes/web.php file and add new route which will be associated to just created index method.

Route::get("/car", [\App\Http\Controllers\CarController::class, 'index']);

In the exact same way you can define other methods in CarController and associate to new routes.

How let’s access http://127.0.0.1:8000/car into browser and you should see the following output.

Index method from CarController

Basic Controllers