Having learned about Laravel's conventions, working with dependencies using Composer, and setting up a development environment with Homestead, you are now ready to build your first application!
In this chapter, you will use the concepts presented in the previous two chapters in a practical way and learn how to do the following:
Plan the URLs and entities of your application
Troubleshoot common issues when getting started
Define routes and their actions, as well as models and their relationships
Prepare your database and learn how to interact with it using Eloquent
Use the Blade template language to create hierarchical layouts
The first step in creating a web application is to identify and define its requirements. Then, once the main features have been decided, we derive the main entities as well as the URL structure of the application. Having a well-defined set of requirements and URLs is also essential for other tasks such as testing; this will be covered later...