Is there an equivalent to Django REST Framework in Laravel 5 on this subject? It would be nice if there was a tool that generates pages in which the client can navigate through the api tree and where I can test my api endpoints without writing front-end code for each of them.
Swagger will help you out here. It's not quite as automagical as what Django REST Framework gives you unfortunately and you have to write the documentation for your API endpoints yourself.
Here's a good introduction to working with Swagger in a Laravel app. You should also consider adding Swaggervel into your project as this takes out some of the leg work of tying Swagger support into your app.