Building Modern Laravel APIs: Foundations and Project Structure

I have built a lot of Laravel APIs over the years. Some of them were good. Some of them were not. The ones that were not good all had something in common - they started without a clear set of opinions about how the application should be structured, and by the time those opinions became necessary, the codebase was already fighting back. This series is about doing it right from the start. We are going to build Pulse-Link - a smart lead ingestion engine that receives raw lead data, enriches it using AI, and organises it so a sales team knows exactly who to contact first. But Pulse-Link is the vehicle, not the destination. The patterns, the decisions, and the architectural opinions we establish in this first article are the things you will take to your own projects. By the end of this series you will have a complete, production-ready Laravel API. Let's start by building the foundation it sits on. What We Are Building Pulse-Link is a high-performance ingestion engine. It is not a CRM - it d