Of course, all routes and controllers should return some kind of response to be sent back to the user's browser. Laravel provides several different ways to return responses. The most basic response is simply returning a string from a route or controller:
The given string will automatically be converted into an HTTP response by the framework.
However, for most routes and controller actions, you will be returning a full IlluminateHttpResponse instance or a view. Returning a full Response instance allows you to customize the response's HTTP status code and headers. A Response instance inherits from the SymfonyComponentHttpFoundationResponse class, providing a variety of methods for building HTTP responses: