Request lifecycle

Same physics as the PHP tutorial - request in, response out. Laravel just runs a nicer pipeline before your code.

The spine

Comments for the flow above:

• public/index.php still requires Composer autoload - nothing magical
• Middleware = the wrappers you sketched as stretch goals on the mini-router
• Router match is your {name} patterns grown up
• Response can be Blade HTML, JSON, redirect, file download…

Compared to the mini-router

// your toy version
$response = $router->dispatch($method, $path);
$response->send();

Laravel:

1. Creates an Illuminate\Http\Request from globals ($_GET, $_SERVER, …)
2. Sends it through middleware (session start, CSRF verify, auth, …)
3. Dispatches to a route action
4. Sends an Illuminate\Http\Response (or subclass)

You don't call echo and header() by hand anymore - return values / helpers do that.

Where "magic" actually is

• Service container builds controller dependencies
• Facades resolve out of that container
• Eloquent lazy-loads relations if you aren't careful (we cover N+1 later)
• Blade compiles to plain PHP in storage/framework/views

Once you see it as boot → middleware → route → action, Laravel code reviews get much calmer.

Next: declaring routes without writing a regex engine.

Best,

-- ł.