This Laravel app is part of the RealWorld project and implementation of the Laravel best practices.
See how the exact same Medium.com clone (called Conduit) is built using different frontends and backends. Yes, you can mix and match them, because they all adhere to the same API spec
Make sure you have PHP and Composer installed globally on your computer.
Clone the repo and enter the project folder
git clone https://github.com/alexeymezenin/laravel-realworld-example-app.git
cd laravel-realworld-example-app
Install the app
composer install
cp .env.example .env
Run the web server
php artisan serve
That's it. Now you can use the api, i.e.
http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/articles