Introduction
The Laravel API Boilerplate is a production-ready starter template for building RESTful APIs with Laravel 12. It comes pre-wired with the things every real API eventually needs — authentication, roles and permissions, file uploads, auditing, rate limiting and a Docker stack — so you can skip the plumbing and start on your domain.
Why this exists
BaaS platforms like Firebase, Supabase and PocketBase are great for getting a prototype off the ground. But their advantages fade once a project grows: you eventually hit platform limits, opaque pricing, or vendor lock-in.
With AI accelerating day-to-day development, scaffolding a backend from a clean base is no longer the bottleneck it once was. Laravel gives you readable, maintainable syntax, native scalability, and full ownership of your data and infrastructure. This boilerplate is for any developer comfortable with Laravel who wants a best-practices API foundation without assembling it by hand each time.
Design principles
- Configurability first. Every feature exposes its knobs through
config/boilerplate.phpwith matching env vars. If you can’t toggle it from config, treat that as a bug. - One response envelope. Intentional responses and thrown exceptions go through the same JSON shape, so clients only learn one dialect.
- Boilerplate, not a framework. Controllers, mailables, Blade views and config defaults are starting points — they are meant to be edited per project.
- Tests are the source of truth. Each module ships with feature tests that document its real behaviour.
What’s inside
| Area | Highlights |
|---|---|
| Authentication | Dual token + cookie auth, password / OTP / OAuth, email verification |
| Access control | Laratrust roles & permissions, default-role assignment |
| API surface | Standard envelope, global exception renderer, per-endpoint rate limits |
| Storage | Two-phase file uploads with TTL cleanup (local or S3) |
| Observability | Append-only audit log with redaction and retention |
| Delivery | Dockerised stack, Scribe API docs, PHPUnit, Pint |
Continue to Installation to get a local environment running, then explore each module from the sidebar.