How to provide detailed and consistent error responses for API consumers in Laravel?

Centralize API error handling in bootstrap/app.php using withExceptions() to return consistent JSON with status, message, and errors arrays, mapping Laravel exceptions to proper HTTP codes for predictable consumer responses.​

Detect API requests ($request->expectsJson() or api/*), format all errors uniformly with machine-readable codes/messages, hide stack traces in production, and handle validation/authorization separately. Use custom exceptions for business logic; let the global handler format everything else. This ensures frontend teams get reliable, parseable responses every time.chunk() processes records in fixed-size batches (e.g., 1000 at a time) using LIMIT/OFFSET, while cursor() streams one record at a time via generators for minimal memory use on massive datasets.​

Use chunk(1000, callback) for batch operations like exports or jobs where you need related data with with(); switch to cursor() for memory-critical tasks like 1M+ record updates since it avoids loading collections entirely. Always pair with select() for essential columns only and chunkById() on mutable tables to prevent skips/duplicates.

Code

// bootstrap/app.php (Laravel 11+)
->withExceptions(function (Exceptions $exceptions) {
    $exceptions->render(function (Throwable $e, Request $request) {
        if (!$request->expectsJson()) return null;
        
        return response()->json([
            'status' => 'error',
            'message' => $e->getMessage(),
            'errors' => [$e instanceof ValidationException ? $e->errors() : $e->getMessage()],
            'code' => $e->getCode()
        ], match (true) {
            $e instanceof ValidationException => 422,
            $e instanceof ModelNotFoundException => 404,
            default => 500
        });
    });
})


// Custom exception example
class InsufficientBalanceException extends Exception {
    public function render(Request $request) {
        return response()->json([
            'status' => 'error',
            'message' => 'Insufficient balance',
            'code' => 'INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS'
        ], 402);
    }
}