In a post to his site Philip Brown shows a helpful way to manage API exceptions in a Laravel-based API application. In an API, exceptions are particularly important as they can be a hint to what the problem is and make it easier to return the correct error code to the client.

Exceptions are a very important method for controlling the execution flow of an application. When an application request diverges from the happy path, it’s often important that you halt execution immediately and take another course of action.

In today’s tutorial I’m going to show you how I structure my Laravel API applications to use Exceptions. This structure will make it very easy to return detailed and descriptive error responses from your API, as well as make testing your code a lot easier.

He starts with a brief introduction to HTTP status codes and their role in the interaction between client and server. He then gets into the "exception foundation" and how it will work, providing some basic common functionality (like throwing a 404 when a record isn't found, regardless of the type). He creates a configuration file to define the default error messages, an abstract Exception the custom instances can extend. He creates several of these as an example, such as a "UserNotFound" exception that extends the base "NotFound" exception class. He works with Laravel's own exception handlers and includes the code to catch a few different types inside.