[durpleDrank]

You could try LUMEN which is a lite version of Laravel. Took me around a day or two to fully get what was happening. I'm at the point now where I want to switch a big project I've been working on over to Laravel but it's a bit of a PITA.

Anyway, for hello world stuff or a small api project try beginning with LUMEN.

https://lumen.laravel.com/docs/8.x

[tomschlick]

Lumen is mainly feature complete and its mostly recommended to just use Laravel and unload the service providers you dont need.

[bnt]

Correct, Laravel + Octane is now recommended instead of Lumen.