On the Laravelista.com site there's a recent tutorial posted showing you how to create an API with Lumen and Fractal, a combination of the popular Laravel-based microframework and Fractal, an output handling library that makes it simpler to transform data to your needs. This is the second part of his series (part one is here), making some improvements on his previous examples.

In the previous post I used Larasponse to get Fractal working with Laravel, but recently I have switched to native Fractal package. One thing to notice is that in this post I will be showing you parts of code from a real project that I am working on called Treeline, instead of just example code like in the previous post. Be sure to check the Treeline repository if you're unclear on something.

He goes back through some of the setup process, getting Fractal installed via Composer and the creation of an ApiController to handle basic things like setting the status code and transforming the response to JSON. He shows how to add in the necessary routes for the "projects" path and creates the matching controller, collection and item classes that integrate the Fractal transformers to format their output as JSON. He also includes the code for the transformer classes themselves, showing you how to pull in and modify the data for the API's needs. He ends the post showing how to integrate other data (the "notes" into a "project" instance) and the resulting JSON output.