Laravel Responses

A zombie developer does not respond well to their clients, whereas a Laravel developer sends clear and concise responses.

When we refer to Responses we are primarily referring to the output that we send to the client. When our Laravel app receives a request, it can then send a response.

Responses

In the previous section, we talked about requests and how our Laravel app can accept them. In this section we are going to cover responses.

When our app get's a request, it can also return a response.

Here's a simple example of a response:

Route::get('/apocalypse', function () {
    echo 'End of the World!';
});

In the example above our laravel app recieves a GET request to the /apocalypse route and it returns a string as the response. This is the simplest form of a response.

So, when we return a response that contains HTML our Laravel app is essentially returning an HTML document that gets displayed in the users browser.

Attach a Cookie to a Response

In the previous section we talked about how your app can retrieve a cookie, now lets see how we can set a cookie by attaching it to a response. Remember a cookie is stored on the client side (browser), so when our app sends a response it will need to attach a cookie to be set by the browser.

We can easily do this by attaching it to the end of a view response like so:

Route::get('set_cookie', function(){
    return response()->view('apocalypse')->withCookie('name', 'value');
});

JSON responses

If we wanted to output a JSON response for a particular route we could use the following syntax:

Route::get('json_response', function(){
    $data = array(
        'name' => 'Johnny Bullet Holes',
        'strength' => 'strong');

    return response()->json( $data );
});

By running the route above, we get a nice JSON output as the response.

Lastly, we can perform a redirect as a response like so:

Route:get('redirect_me', function(){
    return redirect('zombie/1');
});

or even simpler, we could create a redirect like so:

Route::redirect('redirect_me', 'zombie/1');

The route above will redirect to the site.com/zombie/1 route as a response.

View response

The most common response your app will send is an HTML response from one of your application views.

When you return a view in your Laravel app, it is essentially the same thing as returning an HTML response. Here is a quick example from a few sections back:

public function show(){
    // Show our zombies
    $zombies = Zombie::all();

    // Load the view and pass it our data array
    return view('zombies', compact('zombies') );
}

It's pretty straightforward, right? Our application gets a request and returns a response. There are a few more responses that you may want learn about by checking out the docs here https://laravel.com/docs/responses.

Next, let's move on to something exciting called migrations.

Migrations are a way of storing our database schemas in files so they can easily be versioned, shared, and backed up.