Who is Laravel?
Laravel is an open source PHP web application framework that provides a model-view-controller architecture, an object-relational mapping layer, and a developer toolkit for building server-side web applications and APIs.
- Open source PHP web application framework
- Model-view-controller application architecture
- Eloquent object-relational mapping and database migrations
- API development and token-based authentication
- Queued jobs, task scheduling, and event broadcasting
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More About Laravel
Laravel is used by development teams building internal business applications, customer portals, content management systems, and public-facing APIs. Its conventions cover routing, authentication, sessions, caching, and request validation, which reduces custom infrastructure code and supports consistent delivery across teams.
The framework runs on PHP and uses Composer, the PHP dependency manager, for package management. It builds on several Symfony components, including the HttpFoundation layer for request and response handling. Blade serves as the templating engine, Eloquent provides an active record ORM, and Artisan supplies a command-line interface for scaffolding, migrations, and scheduled tasks. Queue support enables asynchronous processing through backends such as Redis and database drivers, and the framework includes testing support that integrates with PHPUnit.
Laravel belongs to the same solution category as Symfony, Ruby on Rails, and Django, all of which provide full-stack MVC frameworks for server-side web development. Laravel is generally distinguished by its opinionated conventions and expressive syntax, while Symfony follows a more modular, component-based approach. Selection among these options typically depends on the language standards and skills already present within an organization.
For technical leaders, the framework's significance lies in its mature package ecosystem, broad community of contributors, and regular release cycles that include long-term support versions. Organizations evaluate it for shorter delivery timelines, built-in security measures such as CSRF protection and encrypted cookies, and maintainability of application codebases. In software development tooling, Laravel is positioned within application frameworks for building web applications and APIs.
Our description of Laravel. Updated November 2026.