Laravel 5.1 Application Structure

Introduction

The default Laravel application structure is intended to provide a great starting point for both large and small applications. Of course, you are free to organize your application however you like. Laravel imposes almost no restrictions on where any given class is located - as long as Composer can autoload the class.

The Root Directory

The root directory of a fresh Laravel installation contains a variety of folders:

The app directory, as you might expect, contains the core code of your application. We'll explore this folder in more detail soon.

The bootstrap folder contains a few files that bootstrap the framework and configure autoloading, as well as a cache folder that contains a few framework generated files for bootstrap performance optimization.

The config directory, as the name implies, contains all of your application's configuration files.

The database folder contains your database migration and seeds. If you wish, you may also use this folder to hold an SQLite database.

The public directory contains the front controller and your assets (images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.).

The resources directory contains your views, raw assets (LESS, SASS, CoffeeScript), and localization files.

The storage directory contains compiled Blade templates, file based sessions, file caches, and other files generated by the framework. This folder is segregated into app, framework, and logs directories. The app directory may be used to store any files utilized by your application. The framework directory is used to store framework generated files and caches. Finally, the logs directory contains your application's log files.

The tests directory contains your automated tests. An example PHPUnit is provided out of the box.

The vendor directory contains your Composer dependencies.

The App Directory

The "meat" of your application lives in the app directory. By default, this directory is namespaced under App and is autoloaded by Composer using the PSR-4 autoloading standard. You may change this namespace using the app:name Artisan command.

The app directory ships with a variety of additional directories such as Console, Http, and Providers. Think of the Console and Http directories as providing an API into the "core" of your application. The HTTP protocol and CLI are both mechanisms to interact with your application, but do not actually contain application logic. In other words, they are simply two ways of issuing commands to your application. The Console directory contains all of your Artisan commands, while the Http directory contains your controllers, middleware, and requests.

The Jobs directory, of course, houses the queueable jobs for your application. Jobs may be queued by your application, as well as be run synchronously within the current request lifecycle.

The Events directory, as you might expect, houses event classes. Events may be used to alert other parts of your application that a given action has occurred, providing a great deal of flexibility and decoupling.

The Listeners directory contains the handler classes for your events. Handlers receive an event and perform logic in response to the event being fired. For example, a UserRegistered event might be handled by a SendWelcomeEmail listener.

The Exceptions directory contains your application's exception handler and is also a good place to stick any exceptions thrown by your application.

Note: Many of the classes in the app directory can be generated by Artisan via commands. To review the available commands, run the php artisan list make command in your terminal.

Namespacing Your Application

As discussed above, the default application namespace is App; however, you may change this namespace to match the name of your application, which is easily done via the app:name Artisan command. For example, if your application is named "SocialNet", you would run the following command:

php artisan app:name SocialNet

Of course, you are free to simply use the App namespace.