Did you already took a look at Lumen? It should work perfectly in combination with Angular :)

If you're going to create a API based application, you can use a index.html to render everything on it. Use the index.php for the requests only should do

I did look at Lumen and it seemed like the better of the 2 since I only really need the basics, not a fully loaded framework.

But the packages I currently have, I am not sure if they are lumen friendly. If it works for Laravel 5 should it work with Lumen?

I have my angular index.html in app/public/index.html but going to dev.local/ loads the resources/views/index.blade.php which is not what I want, how to tell laravel to render the angular index.html? or render nothing at all.... not sure if i am doing this right with angular files inside laravel?

@movepixels if it works for Laravel 5 it will surely work for with Lumen. Lumen is exactly what you need.

I did dowload and start looking into it, but first thing I noticed was my current app I have 100+ controllers and each has Request/Folder/FormRequest and DeleteRequest which I like

Lumen I did not see this, the docs anyways have that old style validator all in the controller and I do not want to re-write what I currently have to and older style of Laravel.

If the option for FormRequest is available in Lumen I would opt for it.

Maybe you can use REST? I do ajax request from my react.js frontend to laravel end from laravel i send json response...

public function deletetrip($id) {
		$trip = Trip::find($id);

		if($trip->delete()) {
			$result = ["message" => ["Deleted successfully!"], "tripId" => $id];
			$response = response()->json($result)->header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
		} else {
			$result = ["message" => ["Something went wrong!"]];
			$response = response()->json($result, 440)->header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
		}

		return $response;
	}