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6 Laravel API Design Patterns I Wish I’d Known 5 Years Ago
Five years ago, I thought building APIs was straightforward. You create some routes, return JSON, and call it a day. Fast forward through countless production incidents, frustrated frontend teams, and expensive refactors, I’ve learned that API design is an art form that can make or break your application’s scalability.
Today, I want to share the Laravel API patterns that would have saved me months of headaches and helped my applications scale gracefully from day one. These aren’t academic concepts, they’re battle-tested solutions born from real-world pain points.
Pattern 1: Consistent Response Wrapper (The Foundation)
The Mistake I Made: My early APIs returned inconsistent response formats. Sometimes a successful response looked like this:
// User endpoint
return response()->json($user);
// Posts endpoint
return response()->json(['data' => $posts]);
// Error somewhere else
return response()->json(['error' => 'Something went wrong'], 500);The Consequence: Frontend developers constantly had to check response structures. Error handling was scattered and inconsistent. Adding new fields meant breaking changes.
