NEW Laravel (Unofficial) API Starter Kit: Built by Me and Fable 5

Hello guys, in this video I want to present to you my new project released. It's Laravel API starter kit which is not available in the official starter kits. There are only react view livewire and recent spelt version but nothing for people who want to release just API without the web layer at all. And I know the core team is working on API starter kit version to be released sometime later in 2026, but I decided not to wait and asked Fable 5 cloth model which was still available at the time last week to build me a starter kit. So in this video I will show you how it works, what are the features inside. It's already released and you can use it. And also in addition to this video on this channel, I'm publishing at the same time another video on my native PHP daily channel about the client native PHP app that would use the API built with this starter kit. And also I'm publishing both videos at the same time. I should be on stage of Laravel live UK talking about starter kits in general. So this is where that whole idea comes together. Now API starter kit. The idea was basically this. No front end, no npm deployment, no fortify because I prefer to be in full control of the O. Basically the project that is only for API without unnecessary files or terminal commands and it was almost successful. So I spent a few hours planning that so that Claude Fable 5 model was used for implementation. But for planning mode, it was quite a heavy session with Claude Opus. And along the way, I discovered that it's not that simple to build a starter kit. A lot of decisions along the way. But let me show you what I ended up with. So you can run Laravel new using this starter kit. And this is what you will get. Let me demonstrate. You choose past. You choose Laravel boost. Let's choose no at the moment for a shorter video. And then it's doing almost the same thing as a general regular starter kit. And this thing was a problem along the way. I discovered or Claude discovered that it's not possible currently to work around this question. So I wanted to totally ignore that. But manually you need to choose no. Interestingly in the official Laravel installer there is a commit in the main branch for no node option. So I would need to adapt that in the starter kit as well to totally avoid node and npm things. But at the moment it's not released in the official version. It's on the branch of main but the latest release of Laravel installer was before that. But at some point this will be released I hope pretty soon. But for now you will still get asked for npm and you choose no. Okay we have our API. What's inside? And the best way to understand what's inside is to run route list except vendor and these are the routes in the whole project API v1 and then everything related to o of API using Laravel Sanctum. So yes there is routes web with homepage which also returns JSON with the link to the documentation. So if you launch that in the browser, you would see something like this and documentation with scramble is a part of that starter kit. But I will get to that a bit later. But the main thing in the routes API is this. So public routes to register, login and forgot and reset password with throttling and throttling may be different for each of them. and then the non-public routes for getting the user log out and getting the tokens or managing the tokens to log out other devices. So for example in postman if we launch that get user while being not logged in we get message unauthenticated 401 as expected and as you can see along the way this was one of the decisions I had to make with planning session with cloud code v1 by default. So there's route prefix v1 for all of the routes in the current starter kit. But it's pretty easy to change and it's pretty easy to create v2 in the future potentially creating API v2 routes file. So as usual, Laravel makes it pretty configurable either here directly or in the bootstrap app. You can also customize global stuff. But for this starter kit, I made a decision to go with v1 including the name spaces of controllers in this case. And if we go for example inside of O controller you have register request which is form request also with v1 namespace. Now let me show you the full kind of cycle of authentication because Laravel starter kits are about authentication. So here's how it works in Postman. So you register with new user and you get the bearer token. So this is the result. you have the token and then you use that token for all the other requests to the endpoints of API. So I will copy that one and then for example you can get the user now the same endpoint as we used previously without the data but with authorization bear token. This is how it works in Postman. I've pasted that token and then I send and I get the data for my loggedin user. And then on top you can add your own routes in the routes API here for actually features of your app. And this is protected by O Sanctum middleware. Also we can then login with the same user and password we send and we get a new bearer token to work with. Also with a logged in user you may perform more operations. So these are the routes and if we go to that user controller we have update with the user resource returned also update password or destroy your own account. Most of those things are actually ported from Laravel Fortify. I just personally wish to have it outside of any package dependency. Fortify is basically in my opinion is a glue between all the possible Laravel starter kit flavors. So this is kind of convenience for the core team to manage it all. But if I have my own one starter kit, then Fortify is kind of unnecessary burden in my opinion. Again, there's nothing specifically wrong with Fortify. It was actually created from what I remember when Jetream and Breeze starter kits were released and then Taylor had a problem how to make that O work in both. So that's how Fortify was born in the first place. So yeah, these are the main o functions of API starter kit unofficial by myself and claude. I didn't remove that contribution username of claude and you can read the full documentation. I will link that in the description below. And also I've shot a premium longer video discussing more topics of that API starter kit. 14 minutes video is for premium members of Laravel Daily where I discuss rate limiting documentation with scramble features like reset password and forgot password and also token management to log out other devices. So the link to that premium longer video will be in the description below. But what do you think about that API starter kit? Is it good? Would you use it? And you can of course fork it and do your own changes or what other features more or maybe less features you envision in a typical API starter kit. I'm looking forward to the official starter kit for API as well later in 2026 and I'm curious to compare the visions and the features. As usual, we can discuss all of that in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other