Laravel is a server-side web application framework for PHP, created by Taylor Otwell and first released in 2011. The project repository describes it as “a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax,” and that emphasis on developer ergonomics, in the spirit of Ruby on Rails, drove its rise to become the most widely used modern PHP framework.
A defining trait of Laravel is that it is built on top of reusable Symfony components rather than from scratch, layering its own conventions and a more approachable API over that proven foundation. This let Laravel inherit a robust HTTP and routing core while focusing its own design effort on the parts developers touch daily: a clean application structure, a service container for dependency injection, and a large library of first-party packages for authentication, queues, caching, and more.
Three pieces define the everyday Laravel experience. Eloquent is its Active Record ORM, in which each model class maps to a database table and a model instance wraps a single row, so persistent data is read and written through ordinary PHP objects. Blade is its templating engine, compiling lightweight template syntax down to plain PHP while supporting layouts, components, and control structures. Artisan is its command-line console, used to scaffold code, run database migrations, manage queues, and automate routine tasks.
Laravel also leaned heavily on the surrounding PHP ecosystem that emerged in the same period. It is distributed and its dependencies are managed through Composer, the dependency manager that made it practical to compose PHP applications from many small packages. That pairing, a batteries-included framework on top of a modern package manager, mirrored the way Rails paired with RubyGems and Bundler in the Ruby world.
Beyond the core framework, Laravel grew into a broad commercial and open-source ecosystem, with official tools and services for deployment, billing, real-time broadcasting, full-text search, and administration. By making PHP development feel modern and pleasant, Laravel played a large role in keeping PHP relevant for new web projects well into an era dominated by JavaScript front-end frameworks.