How to build a REST API in laravel 5.7

1. Prerequisites:

   1. A basic knowledge of Laravel
   2. A basic knowledge of Rest APIs
   3. Have the laravel installer installed on your computer
    
2.  What we'll be building:
• The purpose of this demonstration, we'll be building a camera reviews API.
• Users will be able to add create camera, update camera and delete camera.
• Users will also be able to view a list all cameras and relationship in camera.
• Finally, we'll add authentication with JSON Web Tokens( JWT) to make the API secured.
3. Create a new Laravel app

•  Via laravel installer 

                 Download the laravel installer using composer

             composer global require laravel/installer

• Via Composer create project

          composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel api.camera

• Local development server

      php artisan serve 

4.Create models and migrations

     A camera reviewers API will have 3 three models:

users,camera setting types, camera command types, camera settings. (camera category has many camera modems.)

We'll start by creating the camera category both controller and model:

> php artisan make:controller CameraCategoriesController --resource --model=CameraCategory

We'll do the same for the camera modem:

 > php artisan make:controller CameraModemsController --resource --model=CameraModem

• Next, let's open the migration file generated for the camera category migrate and camera modem migrate. Update the up() method as below:

  public function up()
  {
      Schema::create('camera_categories', function (Blueprint $table){
        $table->increments('id');      $table->string('type_name');      $table->string('description');      $table->boolean('is_deleted')->default(0);      $table->boolean('is_published')->default(1);
      });}

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('camera_modems', function (Blueprint $table){
      $table->increments('id');      $table->string('modem_name');      $table->text('description')->nullable();      $table->text('MJPEG_stream_source')->nullable();      $table->text('H264_stream_source')->nullable();      $table->text('snapshot_source')->nullable();      $table->unsignedInteger('setting_type_id')->nullable();      $table->unsignedInteger('camera_category_id');      $table->foreign('camera_category_id')->references('id')

            ->on('camera_categories')->onDelete('cascade');    });}

public function down()
{
    Schema::dropIfExists('camera_modems',function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->dropForeign('camera_category_id');    });}

we definne the fields for the camera modems table which are an auto increment ID.
Run the command below to run the migrations
> php artisan migrate

Remember to enter your database details in the .env file before running the command ablove.

Define relationships between models:

• A user can management many camera categories, but a camera categories can only belong to one user. So, the relationship between the User model and camera categories modem is one-to-many relationship.

//app/Http/Models/Users.php

public function camera_categories(){

    return $this->hasMany(CameraCategory::class);

}  

•       Next, let's define the inverse relation on the camera category model:

public function user(){
    return $this->belongTo(User::class);} 

 Likewise, a category can be have many camera modems. This is also a one-to-many relationship.Add the code below in the category model:

public function cameraModems(){
    return $this->hasMany(CameraModem::class);}

Then we define the inverse relationship inside the camera modem model:
 //app/Http/Models/CameraModem.php

public function cameraCategory()
{
    return $this->belongsTo(CameraCategory::class, 'camera_category_id');} 

4.Allowing mass assignment on some fields