Building an Enterprise-Grade Laravel 12 & React SPA: Architecture, Auth, and Full CRUD

Let’s bypass the endless debate over Monolith vs. SPA. If you've decided a decoupled architecture is genuinely what your project demands, you need to build it right. A standard tutorial will show you how to connect Laravel to React. But in a production environment, dropping all your business logic into a Controller or relying on React's useEffect for data fetching is a recipe for unmaintainable spaghetti code. When you build systems meant to scale, every read and write must pass through strict boundaries: Routing, Validation, Authorization, Services, and Repositories on the backend, paired with Feature-Sliced caching on the frontend. Here is the definitive blueprint for a full CRUD application with authentication and authorization using Laravel 12, React, Sanctum, and TanStack Query. Part 1: The Laravel Backend (Strict Boundaries) First, scaffold the Laravel application and install the API and Sanctum requirements. composer create-project laravel/laravel backend or laravel new backend