Generate beautiful RESTful Laravel API documentation with Swagger

Do you document your API application? Tell me in the comment below.

Without a proper API documentation, your peers or coworkers have no idea how to discover the API endpoints and their usages.

L5 Swagger

Swagger is the most popular framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification(OAS).

Swagger-php generates interactive Swagger documentation for RESTful API.

Swagger UI is a collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation from a Swagger-compliant API.

L5 Swagger is a package adapts swagger-php and swagger-ui to work with Laravel 5.

Installation

Install l5-swagger package in your Laravel 5 project via Composer.

composer require darkaonline/l5-swagger

After the installation, you can find the l5-swagger commands with artisan command.

php artisan list
...
 l5-swagger
  l5-swagger:generate        Regenerate docs
  l5-swagger:publish         Publish config, views
  l5-swagger:publish-config  Publish config
  l5-swagger:publish-views   Publish views

Before you start to develop with the package, you publish its files.

Publishing files

Publish the package files with artisan command.

php artisan l5-swagger:publish
Publishing all files
Copied File [/vendor/darkaonline/l5-swagger/config/l5-swagger.php] To [/config/l5-swagger.php]
Copied Directory [/vendor/darkaonline/l5-swagger/resources/views] To [/resources/views/vendor/l5-swagger]
Publishing complete.

First API endpoint

Now, you create an endpoint and automate the documentation.

Create a resourceful controller named SampleController.

php artisan make:controller SampleController --resource
Controller created successfully.

Swagger works along with the object inheritance. On the parent object, you declare the base path and general information like title and version.