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

In this lesson

Build a tiny Laravel app page that uses the full beginner flow: route, controller, Blade view, and passed data.

Project goal

Create a /hello page that shows:

a greeting message,
current environment name,
current date and time.

This gives you one working end-to-end request path.

Step 1: Generate a controller

Run:

php artisan make:controller HelloController

Then edit app/Http/Controllers/HelloController.php:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\View\View;

class HelloController extends Controller
{
    public function index(): View
    {
        return view('hello', [
            'message' => 'Hello Laravel',
            'environment' => app()->environment(),
            'now' => now()->toDateTimeString(),
        ]);
    }
}

Step 2: Add a route

Edit routes/web.php:

use App\Http\Controllers\HelloController;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('/hello', [HelloController::class, 'index'])->name('hello.index');

Step 3: Create the Blade view

Create resources/views/hello.blade.php:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Hello Laravel</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{{ $message }}</h1>
    <p>Environment: {{ $environment }}</p>
    <p>Server time: {{ $now }}</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 4: Run and verify

Start the app if needed:

php artisan serve

Open:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/hello

Expected result:

page renders with "Hello Laravel",
environment value appears (local on most dev setups),
time updates on refresh.

What this mini project teaches

flowchart LR
  A[Route in web file] --> B[HelloController index method]
  B --> C[Blade hello view]
  C --> D[HTML in browser]

You now have a repeatable baseline for new pages: route, controller action, view, and data binding.

From Laravel best practices — What is Laravel?