Originally published on laravel.learnio.dev — part of the Laravel best practices course. View this lesson on the original site.

Use Artisan as your daily Laravel control panel

Artisan is Laravel's command-line interface. You use it to run framework tasks quickly without manually wiring boilerplate.

Start with these commands

From your project root:

php artisan list
php artisan --version

list shows available commands.
--version confirms Laravel version in the current project.

Commands you will use immediately

php artisan serve
php artisan route:list
php artisan make:controller PostController
php artisan make:model Post -m
php artisan migrate
php artisan test

What they do:

serve: run local dev server.
route:list: inspect registered routes.
make:controller: generate a controller class.
make:model -m: generate model + migration.
migrate: apply database schema changes.
test: run test suite.

A safe development loop with Artisan

flowchart LR
  A[Edit code] --> B[Generate/inspect with artisan]
  B --> C[Run migrate or test]
  C --> D[Verify in browser/API]

Practical tips

Always run commands from the project root (where artisan lives).
Use route:list and test before committing route/controller changes.
Read command help with:

php artisan help make:controller

If you know this workflow, you can move faster without losing reliability.

From Laravel best practices — What is Laravel?