How I Structure Every Laravel REST API Project

Every time I start a new Laravel API project, I used to spend half a day on the same setup: Sanctum authentication Spatie roles & permissions Consistent JSON error responses API versioning Rate limiting After doing this on project after project, I finally settled on a structure that works every time. Here's exactly how I do it. 1. Consistent JSON Response Format The first thing I set up is a trait that forces every endpoint to return the same JSON structure. Nothing is more annoying than an API that returns different formats for success vs errors. <?php namespace App\Traits ; trait ApiResponseTrait { public function successResponse ( $data , $message = 'Success' , $statusCode = 200 ) { return response () -> json ([ 'success' => true , 'message' => $message , 'data' => $data , 'meta' => [ 'version' => 'v1' , 'timestamp' => now () -> toISOString (), ], ], $statusCode ); } public function errorResponse ( $message = 'Error' , $statusCode = 400 , $errors = []) { return response () -> json (