Create a REST API using basic PHP with Token Authentication

In this course I will be showing you how to create RESTful web services with PHP, no third party frameworks or paid software is needed.

We will be covering the basics of what REST is and how to implement the basics using pure vanilla PHP, at the end of this course you should be able to create a basic RESTful web service that you can allow other people to use.

The course will follow a scenario that we have been given and that is to implement a web service which can record a list of tasks, basically a to-do list. We will be implementing each requirement one at a time and then we will add on the ability for this API to become a multi user service. So each user can securely have their own task list.

To do this we will be implementing an authentication concept called Token based authentication and we will be exploring this further within the course, Token based authentication is a lot more secure than just basic password authentication and is now a best practice among the industry.

We will be starting at the beginning and building as we go, as long as you know the basics of PHP, such as variables, if statements, loops, arrays and some basic object orientated programming concepts you should be able to follow this course to the end. We will also be using MySQL for the database to store the tasks and we will be building and changing the database as we go, and again you don't need to be an expert on MySQL but just need to know the fundamentals such as basic select, update, delete SQL statements and concepts such as primary keys and foreign keys.

BONUS SECTION ADDED - APRIL 2020 - for CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) which will allow you to adjust this API to run on a different domain/subdomain than your front end application.

BONUS SECTION ADDED - JULY 2020 - for teaching you how to upload images/files against a task, we will go through the changes we need to make to the API to allow uploading of images to a task. We will then allow you to associate image attributes such as title and filename against the image as well as being able to download the image and delete the image.