GUIDES
The three visibility keywords control where a property or method can actually be accessed from — the distinction between protected and private specifically comes down to whether a subclass gets access too.
A plain unique rule breaks in two common situations — editing a record without triggering a false "already taken" error against itself, and soft-deleted rows still counting as taken.
"Users who have at least one order over $100" can't be expressed with a normal where() clause — whereHas() is specifically for filtering a query based on a related model's data.
PHP classes can only extend one parent — traits are the language's answer to needing the same reusable method in several otherwise-unrelated classes without that single-inheritance limit getting in the way.
Composer manages a project's external library dependencies and their versions — every modern PHP framework, Laravel included, is built on top of it, not alongside it.
A component becomes genuinely reusable through its public API — @Input/@Output for data, and content projection (ng-content) for letting the parent supply arbitrary markup, not just values.
An unchecked checkbox sends no value at all in the request, not false — Laravel's accepted rule exists specifically to handle this quirk correctly.
Laravel's Http facade is a fluent wrapper around Guzzle — the current standard way to call an external API, replacing hand-rolled cURL or file_get_contents calls for anything server-to-server.
By default Laravel pagination links drop your filter/sort query params on page 2+. Here is how to keep them with appends() or withQueryString().
Loading only the columns a relationship actually needs, rather than every column, is a genuine performance win — with one easy-to-miss requirement: the foreign key must always be included.
MySQL and PostgreSQL both support indexing and querying inside a JSON column directly — Eloquent exposes that through arrow syntax and dedicated whereJson* methods, without raw SQL.
A bulk insert() call skips every model event and timestamp auto-fill Eloquent normally handles — a trade genuinely worth making for raw insert speed, but only when those side effects aren't actually needed.
