Installation
Server Requirements
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. Of course, all of these requirements are satisfied by the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, so it's highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Laravel development environment.
However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:
Installing Laravel
Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Laravel, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.
Via Laravel Installer
First, download the Laravel installer using Composer:
composer global require "laravel/installer"
Make sure to place the
~/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the
equivalent directory for your OS) in your PATH so the
laravel executable can be located by your
system.
Once installed, the laravel new command will
create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you
specify. For instance, laravel new blog
will create a directory named blog
containing a fresh Laravel installation with all of
Laravel's dependencies already installed. This method of
installation is much faster than installing via
Composer:
laravel new blog
Via Composer Create-Project
Alternatively, you may also install Laravel by issuing
the Composer create-project command in your
terminal:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog
Configuration
All of the configuration files for the Laravel framework
are stored in the config directory. Each
option is documented, so feel free to look through the
files and get familiar with the options available to
you.
Directory Permissions
After installing Laravel, you may need to configure some
permissions. Directories within the storage
and the bootstrap/cache directories should
be writable by your web server or Laravel will not run.
If you are using the Homestead virtual machine,
these permissions should already be set.
Application Key
The next thing you should do after installing Laravel is
set your application key to a random string. If you
installed Laravel via Composer or the Laravel installer,
this key has already been set for you by the php
artisan key:generate command. Typically, this
string should be 32 characters long. The key can be set
in the .env environment file. If you have
not renamed the .env.example file to
.env, you should do that now. If
the application key is not set, your user sessions
and other encrypted data will not be
secure!
Additional Configuration
Laravel needs almost no other configuration out of the
box. You are free to get started developing! However,
you may wish to review the config/app.php
file and its documentation. It contains several options
such as timezone and locale
that you may wish to change according to your
application.
You may also want to configure a few additional components of Laravel, such as:
Once Laravel is installed, you should also configure your local environment.