Installing Laravel and Setting Up Environment

Step 1: System Requirements

Before installing Laravel, ensure your system meets the following requirements:

✅ PHP 8.1 or higher
✅ Composer (PHP dependency manager)
✅ MySQL or SQLite (Database)
✅ Node.js & NPM (For frontend assets, optional)

You can check your PHP version using:

php -v

Step 2: Install Composer

Laravel requires Composer to manage dependencies.

🔹 Download Composer from getcomposer.org and install it.
🔹 Verify the installation by running:

composer -V

This should display the Composer version, confirming it's installed.

Step 3: Install Laravel

There are two ways to install Laravel:

1️⃣ Install via Laravel Installer (Recommended)

Run the following command to install Laravel globally:

composer global require laravel/installer

After installation, create a new Laravel project using:

laravel new my_project

2️⃣ Install via Composer (Alternative)

If you don’t use the Laravel installer, you can directly create a Laravel project using:

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

Once installed, navigate to your project folder:

cd my_project

Step 4: Configure Environment Variables

Laravel uses an .env file to manage environment settings.

🔹 Open .env file in the root directory and set database details:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel_db
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=

Replace these values with your actual database credentials.

Step 5: Start Laravel Development Server

Run the following command to start Laravel's built-in development server:

php artisan serve

This will output a local server URL, such as:This will output a local server URL, such as:

Starting Laravel development server: http://127.0.0.1:8000

Step 6: Verify Installation

To ensure Laravel is installed correctly, run:

php artisan --version

This should return the Laravel version installed on your system.

Step 7: Set Up Database (Optional but Recommended)

If you're using MySQL, create a database and configure it in the .env file (as mentioned earlier). Then, run migrations to set up database tables:

php artisan migrate

Conclusion

🎯 You have successfully installed Laravel and set up the development environment! You can now start building applications using Laravel’s powerful features like routing, controllers, models, and authentication.

Next Steps:

👉 Learn about Routing in Laravel to define your application URLs.
👉 Explore Eloquent ORM for database interactions.

Would you like a tutorial on any specific part? 🚀

LARAVEL