Installing Laravel

Installing Laravel and getting your project going is quite easy, if you know how to do it. So here we go!

First of all you’ll need a local server.
You’ll be needing at least PHP version 7.1.3. and I’m currently working on PHP 7.2.

I prefer to install Laravel globally. Use the following command on your terminal.

composer global require "laravel/installer"

After Laravel is installed you can run the simple command.

laravel new myFirstProject

And it will create a new folder for you with the name myFirstProject with a fresh installation of Laravel in it.

The next step is to set up your vhost to your folder. (don’t forget to link it to the public folder)
Once this is done, you’ll be able to browse to your newly created project using the browser of your choosing.

Installing Laravel using these steps will automatically result in a secure installation, meaning that there will be a Application Key generated for you.

Setting up the database

Setting up a database for your project will be quite easy because we will be using the power of artisan to build our project.
The only thing you need to do manually is creating an empty database. Afterwards you’ll need to put in the credentials into the .env file, right over here:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=homestead
DB_USERNAME=homestead
DB_PASSWORD=secret

When this is done we can start using the database.

From this point forward you can start developing your project!