Add support to REST API and Pest on Sail created Laravel 11 application

Reading Time 4 minutes May 29, 2024

Table Of Contents

This is a short one. This is small recipe on how to circumvent 2 situations with Laravel 11 when a project is created with sail:

Enable API support
Switch phpunit for pest

Setting up a Laravel 11 with Sail

To start a project with Laravel Sail, the process is the same as always:

I’m assuming that you’ve added the global sail alias

curl -s "https://laravel.build/laravel-with-pest?with=mariadb" | bash
cd laravel-with-pest
sail up -d
sail artisan migrate # New in 11
sail artisan db:show

I added the sail artisan migrate line since there seems to be a bug (or I’m just missing something) where the initial migration gets executed before the MariaDB container gets initialized.

If you execute sail artisan db:show, you should get something like…

  MariaDB .......................................................... 10.11.8
  Database ......................................................... laravel
  Host ............................................................. mariadb
  Port ................................................................ 3306
  Username ............................................................ sail
  URL ......................................................................
  Open Connections ....................................................... 1
  Tables ................................................................. 9
  Total Size ..................................................... 224.00 KB

  Table ............................................................... Size
  cache ........................................................... 16.00 KB
  cache_locks ..................................................... 16.00 KB
  failed_jobs ..................................................... 32.00 KB
  jobs ............................................................ 32.00 KB
  job_batches ..................................................... 16.00 KB
  migrations ...................................................... 16.00 KB
  password_reset_tokens ........................................... 16.00 KB
  sessions ........................................................ 48.00 KB
  users ........................................................... 32.00 KB

9 tables. Let’s take a note of that.

Replace `phpunit` with `pest`

Laravel Sail does not ask you for a testing framework as Laravel Herd or the composer create-project laravel/laravel example-app command does.

Fortunately, changing the testing framework from phpunit to pest is not so difficult. Just remove phpunit, install pest and initialize it:

sail composer remove phpunit/phpunit --dev
sail composer require pestphp/pest --dev --with-all-dependencies
sail composer require pestphp/pest-plugin-laravel --dev
sail pest --init

To finish the testing framework migration, I’ll use pest drift command to migrate the default tests to the pest syntax:

sail composer require pestphp/pest-plugin-drift --dev
sail pest --drift

You can verify that pest is installed and the tests are migrated with:

cat tests/{Unit,Feature}/ExampleTest.php
ls tests/Pest.php

Since we no longer need the pest migration package, we can remove it:

sail composer remove pestphp/pest-plugin-drift --dev

And now, to execute a test, you only have to execute pest trough sail like so:

sail pest

Create the API Routes

Since Laravel 11, API support is not installed by default, but as everything with Laravel, you just need to execute a couple of commands and your set.

In this case just execute

sail artisan install:api
sail artisan migrate # Optional if you didn't selected yes in the prev command

This will:

Install Laravel Sanctum for API authentication
Create the config/sanctum.php file
Create the database/migrations/<date>_create_personal_access_tokens_table.php migration
Create the routes/api.php file
Modifies the bootstrap/app.php file adding the routes/api.php route in the withRouting function

You can verify that the authentication tables got create with:

sail artisan db:show

And you should get something like

  MariaDB .......................................................... 10.11.8
  Database ......................................................... laravel
  Host ............................................................. mariadb
  Port ................................................................ 3306
  Username ............................................................ sail
  URL ......................................................................
  Open Connections ....................................................... 1
  Tables ................................................................ 10
  Total Size ..................................................... 272.00 KB

  Table ............................................................... Size
  cache ........................................................... 16.00 KB
  cache_locks ..................................................... 16.00 KB
  failed_jobs ..................................................... 32.00 KB
  jobs ............................................................ 32.00 KB
  job_batches ..................................................... 16.00 KB
  migrations ...................................................... 16.00 KB
  password_reset_tokens ........................................... 16.00 KB
  personal_access_tokens .......................................... 48.00 KB
  sessions ........................................................ 48.00 KB
  users ........................................................... 32.00 KB

10 tables! One more than the first migration.

And that’s it… You have an API application with pest support.

Add support to REST API and Pest on Sail created Laravel 11 application

Setting up a Laravel 11 with Sail

Replace phpunit with pest

Create the API Routes

Replace `phpunit` with `pest`