Laravel Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire

12 Laravel interview questions — with what to listen for

1. 1

   Explain the N+1 problem in Eloquent and your habits for preventing it from ever reaching production.

   What a strong answer covers

   Lazy relation loading firing a query per model; eager loading with with(), plus preventive tooling — preventLazyLoading in non-production, query counting in tests, Telescope or Debugbar inspection. The habit framing matters: prevention as a default, not a fix after the outage.

2. 2

   How does the service container work, and when do you bind interfaces to implementations?

   What a strong answer covers

   Automatic constructor resolution, binding in service providers, singleton versus fresh bindings, and contextual binding. Practical uses: swapping payment or notification drivers, faking services in tests. Reciting IoC theory without a concrete swap story is the shallow version.

3. 3

   Walk me through designing a queued job pipeline for something real — say, importing a 100k-row spreadsheet.

   What a strong answer covers

   Chunked jobs rather than one giant one, job batching with progress and failure callbacks, idempotency so retries are safe, rate limiting against external APIs, failed-job handling and monitoring (Horizon). Timeout and memory awareness per job shows production queue mileage.

4. 4

   Where do you put business logic in a Laravel app as it grows — and what do you keep out of controllers and models?

   What a strong answer covers

   A coherent position: action or service classes for use cases, form requests for validation, thin controllers, models kept to relationships/scopes/accessors. Tolerance for pragmatism matters, but 'everything in the controller' or 'everything in the model' both fail at scale.

5. 5

   Explain Eloquent relationships beyond the basics — polymorphic relations, has-many-through — and when each is worth its complexity.

   What a strong answer covers

   Correct use cases: polymorphic for comments/attachments shared across types with the indexing and integrity trade-offs named; hasManyThrough for skipping intermediate hops. Knowing when a plain pivot table plus explicit queries is simpler shows restraint.

6. 6

   How do database transactions work in Laravel, and how do they interact with queued jobs and events?

   What a strong answer covers

   DB::transaction with closure retry for deadlocks, and the classic trap: dispatching jobs or events inside a transaction that later rolls back — solved with afterCommit dispatching. That trap is the whole reason to ask; candidates who know it have debugged real inconsistencies.

7. 7

   What is your testing approach in Laravel — what do you test with feature tests versus unit tests, and how do you keep the suite fast?

   What a strong answer covers

   Feature tests through HTTP as the backbone, unit tests for isolated logic, RefreshDatabase strategies, factories with states, and faking mail/queues/storage/HTTP via the built-in fakes. Suite speed via parallel testing and restraint about browser tests. Pest or PHPUnit fluency both fine.

8. 8

   How do you secure a Laravel application beyond the defaults — mass assignment, authorization, and API auth?

   What a strong answer covers

   Guarded/fillable discipline, policies and gates for authorization with route-level enforcement, Sanctum for SPA/API tokens versus Passport for full OAuth, signed URLs, and rate limiting. Mass-assignment and missing-policy checks are the two audit findings they should anticipate.

9. 9

   A Laravel page loads in three seconds. Take me through your optimization process in order.

   What a strong answer covers

   Measure first — Telescope, Debugbar, or APM — then the usual ladder: N+1s and query optimization, indexes, caching (query, fragment, full-response where valid), queueing slow side work, and only then infrastructure like Octane. Ordered, evidence-driven, and honest about diminishing returns.

10. 10

    How do you handle configuration, environments, and deployment for Laravel — and what breaks when config caching meets env() calls?

    What a strong answer covers

    Config files reading env once, config:cache freezing values so env() outside config files returns null in production — a classic gotcha. Deployment: migrations in release steps, queue restarts on deploy, maintenance-mode or zero-downtime strategies. The env-caching trap is the depth check.

11. 11

    When would you choose Livewire or Inertia versus a separate SPA, and what have you shipped with each?

    What a strong answer covers

    Livewire/Inertia keeping full-stack productivity for server-driven products; separate SPA when a dedicated frontend team or heavy client interactivity justifies the API split. A shipped example with trade-offs beats framework tribalism in either direction.

12. 12

    You inherit a Laravel 8 codebase with no tests and heavy vendor customization. What are your first two weeks?

    What a strong answer covers

    Stabilize: environment reproducibility, characterization tests on money paths, dependency and customization audit, then an incremental upgrade plan (Shift-style tooling acceptable) rather than a rewrite pitch. Judgment about sequencing risk is what the question buys.

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