Install Composer
Laravel utilizes Composer to
manage its dependencies. First, download a copy of the
composer.phar
. Once you have the PHAR archive, you can
either keep it in your local project directory or move to
usr/local/bin
to use it globally on your system. On
Windows, you can use the Composer Windows
installer.
Install Laravel
Via Laravel Installer
First, download the Laravel installer using Composer.
composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"
Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin
directory
in your PATH so the laravel
executable is found when you
run the laravel
command in your terminal.
Once installed, the simple laravel new
command will
create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For
instance, laravel new blog
would create a directory named
blog
containing a fresh Laravel installation with all
dependencies installed. This method of installation is much faster than
installing via Composer.
Via Composer Create-Project
You may also install Laravel by issuing the Composer
create-project
command in your terminal:
composer create-project laravel/laravel {directory} 4.2 --prefer-dist
Via Download
Once Composer is installed, download the 4.2
version of the Laravel framework and extract its contents into a
directory on your server. Next, in the root of your Laravel application,
run the php composer.phar install
(or
composer install
) command to install all of the framework's
dependencies. This process requires Git to be installed on the server to
successfully complete the installation.
If you want to update the Laravel framework, you may issue the
php composer.phar update
command.
Server Requirements
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements:
- PHP >= 5.4
- MCrypt PHP Extension
As of PHP 5.5, some OS distributions may require you to manually
install the PHP JSON extension. When using Ubuntu, this can be done via
apt-get install php5-json
.
Configuration
The first thing you should do after installing Laravel is set your
application key to a random string. If you installed Laravel via
Composer, this key has probably already been set for you by the
key:generate
command. Typically, this string should be 32
characters long. The key can be set in the app.php
configuration file. If the application key is not set, your user
sessions and other encrypted data will not be secure.
Laravel needs almost no other configuration out of the box. You are
free to get started developing! However, you may wish to review the
app/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.
Once Laravel is installed, you should also configure your local environment. This will allow you to receive detailed error messages when developing on your local machine. By default, detailed error reporting is disabled in your production configuration file.
Note: You should never have
app.debug
set totrue
for a production application. Never, ever do it.
Permissions
Laravel may require one set of permissions to be configured: folders
within app/storage
require write access by the web
server.
Paths
Several of the framework directory paths are configurable. To change
the location of these directories, check out the
bootstrap/paths.php
file.
Pretty URLs
Apache
The framework ships with a public/.htaccess
file that is
used to allow URLs without index.php
. If you use Apache to
serve your Laravel application, be sure to enable the
mod_rewrite
module.
If the .htaccess
file that ships with Laravel does not
work with your Apache installation, try this one:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
Nginx
On Nginx, the following directive in your site configuration will allow "pretty" URLs:
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}