DEV Community: Ahmed Hdeawy

🚀 Laravel API Starter Kit: Build APIs Faster with Modern Tools

Ahmed Hdeawy — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:48:49 +0000

Building robust APIs with Laravel just got easier. Introducing the Laravel API Starter Kit—a modern, Dockerized foundation designed to accelerate your backend development.

Idea Brief

The Laravel API Starter Kit is a comprehensive boilerplate designed specifically for backend developers who need to quickly scaffold RESTful APIs using Laravel. Unlike general-purpose starter kits, this one focuses exclusively on API development, implementing industry best practices like Service and Repository patterns to ensure clean, maintainable, and testable code.
This starter kit aims to solve common challenges in API development by providing a standardized structure, consistent response formats, and allowing developers to focus on business logic rather than repetitive boilerplate code.

Core Features

The API Starter Kit includes the following core features:

Service Class Pattern
Repository Pattern
Standardized API Response Structure
API Versioning
Query Builder (Dynamic filtering, sorting, and pagination using Spatie Query Builder)
Authentication using JWT
Request Validation
Resource Transformers
API Documentation
Telescope for Development & Debugging.
Code Quality Tools (Pint, Larastan, IDE Helper)
Pest for Testing (already configured and ready to use, see current tests).
Docker Configuration
Git Hooks (pre-commit and pre-push to automatically run Pint, Larastan, and test suites)

Requirements

PHP 8.2+
Composer
MySQL 8.0+ / PostgreSQL 12+ / SQLite 3

Installation

Using Laravel Installer

laravel new my-app --using=hdeawy/api-starter-kit

Using Composer

composer create-project hdeawy/api-starter-kit

Using Docker

Install starter using Docker

docker run -it --rm \
    -v $(pwd):/app \
    -w /app \
    -e COMPOSER_ALLOW_SUPERUSER=1 \
    composer:2.5 \
    create-project hdeawy/api-starter-kit .

Update the .env file with your database credentials

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=mysql
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel_api
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=password

🔥 Start the Docker containers

sail up -d

Finally, run the migrations and generate the JWT secret

sail artisan migrate

sail artisan jwt:secret

Manually

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:hdeawy/api-starter-kit.git
cd api-starter-kit

Install dependencies

composer install

Copy the .env.example file to .env and set your environment variables

cp .env.example .env

Final setup

php artisan key:generate
php artisan jwt:secret
php artisan migrate

Testing

Run the tests with Pest:

php artisan test

Laravel Pint

Code style fixer for minimalists

composer pint

Larastan

Finding errors in your code:

composer stan

Empower your API development journey with the Laravel API Starter Kit—a modern, efficient, and scalable foundation tailored for today’s web applications.

Boosting Coding Productivity with Github Copilot: My Journey and Insights

Ahmed Hdeawy — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 14:22:42 +0000

Hello fellow developers and tech enthusiasts,

As a developer, finding tools that improve our workflow is crucial. I want to share my experience with a tool that has significantly changed my coding routine: Github Copilot. This AI-powered helper has not only made my coding more efficient but also more enjoyable. In this post, I'll talk about how Copilot has enhanced my productivity and the specific features that make it a standout tool in my daily coding life.

Github Copilot is the most important artificial intelligence tool that has actually increased my productivity by at least 30% daily in coding and problem-solving, and I also learn from them at times.

For a very long time, I used Tabnine because it was free. It worked well for me and helped, but its problem was in accuracy or that its suggestions were generally not consistent with the project I was working on.

But after using Github Copilot for more than a month, I can say the difference between them is vast.

Here, I will highlight some of the features and drawbacks I noticed in Github Copilot that helped me a lot:

Accuracy in suggestions: The accuracy of its results is often not less than 90%, and of course, it reaches 100% many times, and if less, it’s not below 80% mostly.

Suggestions are consistent with the project: It doesn’t just suggest any code. It's consistent with the nature of the project you are working on, whether in the programming language, file type, or even the class you're working within.

Based on the above, you can easily write a simple comment explaining the function you want to create, and it will do it easily.

Or even just write the function name, and it will complete it.

It easily distinguishes the function of the class you are working in and suggests code within the function well.

Also, without writing any instructions, just by going down a line or two, it suggests functions not present in your class, but might be useful or needed by you.

It really understands the context of the project: For example, in the next image, I was actually using TS, and it wrote the function based on it. I already have an interface Email defined with a property named address, so it used it.

It works with you normally in complex situations: If your function has many conditions or DB Queries - as shown in the next image, also based on the data of your project.

It can create the basic properties and functions for the entire class just by defining the class name.

Translation, which really saved me a lot of time - it can translate correctly based on the file name or file path.

Not only does it translate, but it can also write the key and its translation according to your project's method.

This great feature is that it doesn't make you go to Google Translate or others and translates the same key in different files based on the file path - in the next image, which translates into German without even telling it to. But it is understood that this file is located in the language folder in the de folder.

Its add-on has a complete chat where you can talk to it and replace GPT chat and live your life with it without going to GPT.

The add-on has some ready-made commands that might help you while working, like if you want to fix a specific code or function. Or want to write a Test Case for a specific function. Or want to write something in the terminal and you don't know it, like a specific command from Git commands.

If you have an error or even a warning, easily among the suggestions, you will find solutions to fix it or even understand it through copilot.

Another important thing is that it really cares about the efficiency of the suggested code. I once tried to ask GPT, and then wrote a comment in the code about the function's purpose. And I discovered that its code efficiency is much better than GPT by stages.