What is the role of Artisan in Laravel framework?
It seems that you are new in Laravel. I am assuming this because if you were already familiar with Laravel then this won’t be your question. We would have asked «Why Codeignitor doesn’t have artisan command». Now, let’s come to the point. Artisan is the Command line interface(CLI) of Laravel. That means, artisan help you to do many handful things using artisan command. For example: if you type php artisan make:controller MyController in your terminal/command-prompt when you are at the root of your Laravel project, this command will create a Controller for you named as MyController . What if you don’t have artisan command like this? You would need to create a PHP file named as MyController . Then you need to added namespace, php tag and some default code before even starting to write actual code of the controller. Besides, using some extra parameter in this command you can even do more. That’s how artisan helps the Laravel developers. If you don’t like CLI much then that could be a problem. But, I will suggest you to get used to with CLI as soon as possible, CLI is the most used tool after IDE/Editor by a developer. Best of luck.
I think the link you gave in your question more or less answers this:
Artisan is the command-line interface included with Laravel. It provides a number of helpful commands that can assist you while you build your application.
If this is not clear enough for you, Wikipedia has a whole section about Artisan:
Laravel’s command-line interface (CLI), called Artisan, was initially introduced in Laravel 3 with a limited set of capabilities. Laravel’s later migration to a Composer-based architecture allowed Artisan to incorporate different components from the Symfony framework, resulting in the availability of additional Artisan features in Laravel 4.
The features of Artisan are mapped to different subcommands of the artisan command-line utility, providing functionality that aids in managing and building Laravel-based applications. Common uses of Artisan include managing database migrations and seeding, publishing package assets, and generating boilerplate code for new controllers and migrations; the latter frees the developer from creating proper code skeletons. The functionality and capabilities of Artisan can also be expanded by implementing new custom commands, which, for example, may be used to automate application-specific recurring tasks.
So, to sum it up, it is a command line tool included in Laravel, introduced in Laravel 3, which was created as a tool to help with development of Laravel applications.
The PHP Framework For Web Artisans
So the word Artisan is also included in the slogan for the framework.