Install Composer
Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Laravel, you will need to make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.
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 can be located by
your system.
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:
laravel new blog
Via Composer Create-Project
You may also install Laravel by issuing the Composer
create-project
command in your terminal:
composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist
Scaffolding
Laravel ships with scaffolding for user registration and
authentication. If you would like to remove this scaffolding, use the
fresh
Artisan command:
php artisan fresh
Server Requirements
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements:
- PHP >= 5.4
- Mcrypt PHP Extension
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- Tokenizer 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 .env
environment 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
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.
Note: You should never have the
app.debug
configuration option set totrue
for a production application.
Permissions
Laravel may require some permissions to be configured: folders within
storage
and vendor
require write access by the
web server.
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;
}
Of course, when using Homestead, pretty URLs will be configured automatically.