Lumen is a micro-framework provided by Laravel. Lumen is mainly intended to create stateless APIs and has a minimal set of features of Laravel. Also, Lumen is compatible with Laravel, which means that if we just copy our Lumen application to Laravel, it will work fine. The installation is simple. Just use the following Composer command to create a Lumen project, and it will download all the dependencies, including Lumen:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/lumen api
The preceding command will download Lumen and then create our API application. After this, rename .env.example as .env. Also, create a 32-characters-long app key and place it in the .env file. Now, the basic application is ready to use and create APIs.
Note
Lumen is almost the same as Laravel, but some Laravel features are not included by default. More details can be found at https://lumen.laravel.com/docs/5.2.