Turning an existing database into a documented Laravel API

The projects I dread are the ones where the database is the only documentation. Twenty tables, foreign keys, years of production data, and either no API layer at all or a pile of copy-pasted controllers nobody wants to touch.

Writing models, controllers, validation and tests for twenty existing tables by hand takes days. This is the problem that made me add --from-database to installed, /docs/api serves browsable OpenAPI docs immediately. Add --postman and you can hand a collection to the frontend team the same morning.

If the team lives in VS Code, the

If you have a schema that you think would break it, I want to see it. Weird databases are how this feature got better.