A modern RESTful API using Laravel PHP was built from scratch, covering the basics of building a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) API. The API endpoints were created to allow for the creation, reading, updating and deletion of student records. A Student model was created along with a migration file to interact with the database. Validation was added to ensure that only valid data is sent to the API. Request validation and API security were not covered in this tutorial but would be an important next step to implement. The API endpoints were tested using Postman, and the results were confirmed to return the expected responses.