The projects I dread are the ones where the database is the only documentation. Twenty tables, foreign keys, years of production data, and either no API layer at all or a pile of copy-pasted controllers nobody wants to touch.
Writing models, controllers, validation and tests for twenty existing tables by hand takes days. This is the problem that made me add --from-database to laravel-api-generator:
composer require --dev nameless/laravel-api-generator
php artisan make:fullapi --from-database
The generator reads your live schema and produces, for each table, the same stack it builds in normal mode: model with full PHPDoc, thin controller, service, DTO, form requests with real validation rules, resource, factory, seeder, policy, and written tests (PHPUnit, or Pest with --pest).
[GIF demo-from-database.gif (voir fichier 12) : vraie exécution en terminal, pas Claude Design]
What the introspection actually reads
I spent a lot of time making this more than a column dump.
A VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE column doesn't just become a string field. It becomes required|string|max:255|unique:users,email in the form request and fake()->unique()->safeEmail() in the factory.
Foreign keys turn into relations on both sides: posts.user_id gives you Post::user(): BelongsTo and User::posts(): HasMany, both typed in the PHPDoc. On Laravel 11+ the generator reads the real constraints; it also falls back to the <table>_id naming convention for older schemas without them.
Pivot tables are detected (two foreign keys and nothing else) and become belongsToMany on both models, instead of generating a useless PostTag entity. Column pairs like commentable_type + commentable_id become a proper morphTo. Enum columns become native PHP backed enums with casts and Rule::enum validation. A deleted_at column switches the whole entity to soft deletes, restore endpoint included.
You rarely want all tables
php artisan make:fullapi --from-database --tables=posts,categories,comments
Two defaults exist to save you from yourself: migrations are not regenerated (the tables already exist; pass --with-migrations if you want them as code-of-record), and the users table is skipped so your customized User.php survives. --tables=users overrides that explicitly.
The payoff
The generated controllers are Scramble-friendly, so if you have Scramble installed, /docs/api serves browsable OpenAPI docs immediately. Add --postman and you can hand a collection to the frontend team the same morning.
If the team lives in VS Code, the extension runs the same import from a table picker, and its Open API Docs button closes the loop: it checks Scramble, starts the server if none is running, detects the port and opens the docs in the browser. It even offers to create .env from .env.example on a fresh checkout.
Legacy database at 9:00, documented and tested API at 9:15. The business logic still needs a human. The plumbing doesn't.
Notes
The package is a --dev dependency and the generated code doesn't depend on it, so you can treat it as a one-shot migration tool if that's all you need.
- Docs: https://nameless0l.github.io/laravel-api-generator/
- Part 1, on the architecture it generates: part1
If you have a schema that you think would break it, I want to see it. Weird databases are how this feature got better.
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