Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework used for web application development. It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and is known for its elegant syntax and tools for tasks such as routing, authentication, and caching. In this blog post, we will go through the steps of setting up a Laravel application on your local machine.
Step 1: Install PHP and Composer
Before installing Laravel, you must have PHP and Composer installed on your machine. If you do not have them installed, you can download them from the official website. Follow these detailed instructions to install PHP.
After the PHP installation is complete you can now process to install composer.
Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. It allows developers to manage the libraries and packages their project depends on, and it automatically handles installing, updating, and resolving dependencies between them. It is widely used in the PHP community and is considered the de facto standard for managing dependencies in PHP projects. It helps to easily manage and update libraries and dependencies in a project.
Step 2: Install Laravel
Once you have PHP and Composer installed, you can use the Composer command-line tool to install Laravel. Open your command prompt and run the following command:
composer global require laravel/installer
This command will install the Laravel installer, which you can use to create new Laravel projects.
Step 3: Create a new Laravel project
To create a new Laravel project, you can use the following command:
laravel new projectname
Step 4: Configure the database
Laravel comes with an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) called Eloquent, which allows you to interact with your database using an object-oriented syntax. To configure your database, you'll need to update the .env file located in the root of your project. This file contains the configuration settings for your application, including your database connection settings.
Step 5: Run the migrations
Migrations are like version control for your database. They allow you to modify your database schema in a structured and organized way. To create your database tables, you can use the following command:
php artisan migrate
This command will run all of the migrations in the database/migrations directory, creating the necessary tables in your database.
Step 6: Start the server
To start the development server, you can use the following command:
php artisan serve
This command will start a development server at http://localhost:8000. You can visit this URL in your browser to see your application.
In conclusion, setting up a Laravel application is a straightforward process that can be completed in a few simple steps. The framework provides a lot of tools and features out of the box, making it an excellent choice for web application development. With Laravel, you can focus on building your application's functionality and leave the tedious tasks to the framework.