1. Introduction

In this tutorial, we aim to guide you through the process of creating controllers in Laravel. Controllers in Laravel are the traffic cops of your application that direct HTTP requests to appropriate views with data from your models.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to:

• Understand the role and functionality of Controllers in Laravel.
• Create and configure Controllers in Laravel.

Prerequisites:
- Basic understanding of PHP.
- Familiarity with Laravel framework would be beneficial.

2. Step-by-Step Guide

2.1 What is a Controller

In Laravel, a Controller is a class that is responsible for defining the application behavior in response to HTTP requests. It contains methods that are the endpoints of your routes.

2.2 Creating Controllers

To create a controller, Laravel provides an artisan command:

php artisan make:controller ControllerName

You should replace ControllerName with the name of your controller. The new controller will be placed in the app/Http/Controllers directory.

2.3 Basic Controllers

Basic controllers are simple classes that are placed in the app/Http/Controllers directory. Here is an example of a basic controller:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function showProfile()
    {
        // logic here
    }
}

3. Code Examples

3.1 Basic Controller with Route

Let's create a basic controller and route for displaying a user's profile.

1. First, create the controller:

php artisan make:controller UserController

1. Inside the created UserController, add a showProfile method:

public function showProfile()
{
    return view('user.profile');
}

1. Now, we need to create a route that will use this controller method. Open routes/web.php and add:

Route::get('user/profile', 'UserController@showProfile');

The UserController@showProfile tells Laravel to use the showProfile method of UserController when a GET request is made to the /user/profile URL.

4. Summary

In this tutorial, we've covered the basics of controllers in Laravel, including how to create them and how they interact with routes.

For further learning, you can explore resource controllers which are a special type of controller designed to handle CRUD operations with minimal effort.

Additional Resources:

• Laravel Official Documentation
• Laravel Controllers Documentation

5. Practice Exercises

1. Create a controller named ProductController and add a method to display product details.

2. Create a route to map to the product details method in ProductController.

3. Create a controller named BlogController and add methods to create, read, update, and delete blog posts. Then, create routes for each of these methods.

Solutions:

1. Create ProductController:

php artisan make:controller ProductController

Add method to ProductController:

public function showDetails()
{
    return view('product.details');
}

1. Route for product details:

Route::get('product/details', 'ProductController@showDetails');

1. Create BlogController:

php artisan make:controller BlogController

Add methods to BlogController:

public function createPost()
{
    // create post logic
}

public function readPost()
{
    // read post logic
}

public function updatePost()
{
    // update post logic
}

public function deletePost()
{
    // delete post logic
}

Routes for BlogController methods:

Route::get('blog/create', 'BlogController@createPost');
Route::get('blog/read', 'BlogController@readPost');
Route::get('blog/update', 'BlogController@updatePost');
Route::get('blog/delete', 'BlogController@deletePost');