The Routes Directory

The routes directory contains all of the route definitions for your application. By default, three route files are included with Laravel: web.php, api.php, and console.php.

**Note:** It is highly encouraged to bundle your routes into their respective addons that you develop.

The web.php file contains routes that the RouteServiceProvider places in the web middleware group, which provides session state, CSRF protection, and cookie encryption. If your application does not offer a stateless, RESTful API, all of your routes will most likely be defined in the web.php file.

The api.php file contains routes that the RouteServiceProvider places in the api middleware group, which provides rate limiting. These routes are intended to be stateless, so requests entering the application through these routes are intended to be authenticated via tokens and will not have access to session state.

The console.php file is where you may define all of your Closure based console commands. Each Closure is bound to a command instance allowing a simple approach to interacting with each command's IO methods. Even though this file does not define HTTP routes, it defines console based entry points (routes) into your application.

**Pro Tip:** These routes are loaded FIRST. This means that duplicate subsequent routes will override them by name and route path.