Getting Started with Laravel: Installing and Setting Up

Introduction to Laravel

Laravel is a powerful PHP framework designed to make development easier, faster, and more enjoyable. In this post, we’ll guide you through the process of installing Laravel and setting up your environment to start building a full project.

Step 1: Install Composer

Laravel requires Composer, a PHP dependency manager. To install Composer, visit the official website at getcomposer.org and download the installer for your operating system.

Step 2: Install Laravel via Composer

Once Composer is installed, open your terminal and run the following command to install Laravel globally:

composer global require laravel/installer

This will give you access to the laravel command globally on your system.

Step 3: Create a New Laravel Project

After installing the Laravel installer, you can create a new project by running:

laravel new project-name

This will create a fresh Laravel installation in a folder named project-name. Alternatively, you can use Composer directly:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel project-name

Step 4: Serve the Laravel Application

To start your Laravel application, navigate to your project directory and run the following command:

php artisan serve

Visit http://localhost:8000 in your browser to see your Laravel application in action.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve covered the basic steps to set up a Laravel project. In the next post, we’ll dive deeper into Laravel routing and start building practical features for our project.