Setting Up Your Laravel Development Environment

Environment

Laravel, one of the most popular PHP frameworks, is known for its elegant syntax and powerful features. If you’re just starting out with Laravel or looking to set up a fresh development environment, this guide will walk you through the essential steps, from installing Composer and PHP to creating your first Laravel project. We’ll also take a deep dive into the folder structure, helping you understand how everything is organized and what each directory is used for.

Step 1: Installing Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that allows you to manage libraries and packages for your projects. Laravel relies heavily on Composer for package management and installation, so it’s crucial to have it installed on your system.

Installation (macOS/Linux)

To install Composer on macOS or Linux, open your terminal and run the following command:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Move the composer.phar file to a global directory:

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Installation (Windows)

1. Download the Composer setup file.
2. Run the installer and follow the prompts, ensuring you have PHP installed on your system.
3. Once installed, open a terminal (or Command Prompt) and run:

composer --version

This should show the version of Composer installed, confirming that it’s working correctly.

Step 2: Installing PHP

Laravel requires PHP 8.0 or higher. If you’re not sure if PHP is installed on your system, you can check by running:

php -v

If PHP isn’t installed or you’re using an older version, you can download the latest version of PHP from php.net or use a package manager based on your operating system.

macOS

If you use Homebrew, installing PHP is as simple as running:

brew install php

Windows