Silicon photonics is the core technology in the post-Moore’s era, characterized by the deep integration of optoelectronics and microelectronics. Silicon photonics can leverage the existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) infrastructure to fabricate low power consumption, high integration density, fast transmission speed, and high-reliability silicon photonic chips which are widely employed in data centers and communication systems. At present, most optoelectronic devices like Si-based photodetectors and Si-based optical modulators have realized on-chip integration except for the Si-based lasers as essential light sources. The directly epitaxial III-V materials on silicon substrates is recognized as one of the most promising solutions to achieve low-cost and large-size monolithic integration of Si-based lasers, still facing many significant challenges. In this paper, the research progress of Si-based light sources is presented from the aspects of directly epitaxial on-axis III-V/Si (001) substrates, on-axis Si-based laser materials, epitaxy technology and monolithic integration at first. Then the achievements in Si-based directly epitaxial quantum well lasers and quantum dot lasers in our group are reported in detail, including the growth of antiphase domains-free GaAs/Si (001) substrates, epitaxial materials of InGaAs/AlGaAs quantum well lasers and InAs/GaAs quantum dot lasers, and fabrication of novel coplanar electrode structures of silicon photonic chips in parallel mode.