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 directories:
The app
directory, as you might expect, contains the
core code of your application. We'll explore this directory in more
detail soon.
The bootstrap
directory contains a few files that
bootstrap the framework and configure autoloading, as well as a
cache
directory 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
directory contains your database migration
and seeds. If you wish, you may also use this directory 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 directory 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.
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 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 Exceptions
directory contains your application's
exception handler and is also a good place to stick any exceptions
thrown by your application.
The Jobs
directory, of course, houses the queueable jobs for your application. Jobs may be
queued by your application or run synchronously within the current
request lifecycle.
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 Policies
directory contains the authorization policy
classes for your application. Policies are used to determine if a user
can perform a given action against a resource. For more information,
check out the authorization
documentation.
Note: Many of the classes in the
app
directory can be generated by Artisan via commands. To review the available commands, run thephp artisan list make
command in your terminal.