Building a Robust API with Laravel, Clean Architecture, and SOLID Principles

#laravel #api #architecture #webdev

Excited to share a recent back-end project I architected and developed: the Favorite Products API. This isn't just another CRUD API; it's a practical case study on implementing Clean Architecture and SOLID principles with Laravel to build a secure, high-performance, and scalable solution.

The project is a RESTful API designed to manage user's favorite product lists, integrating with an external e-commerce service.

✨ Key Highlights & Challenges Overcome

Performance Optimization (N+1 Problem): I refactored the service layer to transform N+1 external API calls into a single, efficient bulk request (findProductsByIds), dramatically reducing latency.
Security First (IDOR Vulnerability): We patched a critical Insecure Direct Object Reference vulnerability by implementing strict, ownership-based authorization rules in the Form Requests. This is reinforced with feature tests covering 200, 401, and 403 status codes.
Decoupled & Testable Architecture: By using Dependency Inversion (Contracts/Interfaces), we fully decoupled our business logic from the external API client. This makes unit testing a breeze (just mock the interface!) and swapping data sources trivial.
Resilient Error Handling: Instead of letting external service failures fail silently (returning an empty 200 OK), the system now throws custom exceptions, which are caught by a global handler to return a meaningful 503 Service Unavailable response.

The entire stack runs on PHP 8.3/Laravel 12, PostgreSQL, and is containerized with Docker. We also have a comprehensive test suite using Pest and auto-generated, interactive documentation with OpenAPI (Swagger).