Laravel - Installation

PRE-REQUISITES FOR INSTALLING LARAVEL
Before installing Laravel, ensure that you have the following programs already installed 1. Web server 2. PHP 3. MySQL 4. Composer 5. Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Web Server, PHP & MySQL

For this tutorial, we will use XAMPP. XAMPP comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP. The good news is XAMPP is cross platform. If you do not have XAMPP, you can download it from this link. If you prefer working with other types of web servers i.e. IIS, Laravel built in web server, feel free to use them but for these tutorials’ sake, I recommend you work with XAMPP. Installing XAMPP on windows is like installing any windows program. We will not cover how to install it in this tutorial.

Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. You can read more about composer from their official website. You can download composer from this link. We will not cover how to install composer in this tutorial.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

This is optional but highly recommended. We will need an IDE to write code. IDE will make you more productive compared to using a plain text editor. I will be using NetBeans IDE for these tutorials. You can download NetBeans IDE from this link.

How To Install Laravel Using Composer

This section assumes you have already installed composer. In this section, we will;

browse to htdocs in XAMPP or where path to the web server where you want to create
create a new Laravel project using composer
test new Laravel project creation in web browser
Step 1: browse to web server root

Assuming you installed XAMPP to C:/xampp/, open C:/xampp/htdocs using windows explorer
Right click anywhere in C:/xampp/htdocs and select use composer here as shown in the image below
Use composer here

Select use composer here. You will get the following command prompt window

Composer command prompt

Step 2: Create new Laravel project using composer

run the following command
composer create-project laravel/laravel larashop
You will get the following output in the command prompt

Wait for the installation to complete

Create Laravel Project Using Composer

Step 3: Test installation

Browser to the following URL in your web browser.

http://localhost/larashop/public/
Create Laravel Project Using Composer

If you do not get the above welcome page, use the comments section below to share what you get and we will help you out with whatever challenges you will face.