Laravel Installation

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 Composer’s system-wide vendor bin directory in your $PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system. This directory exists in different locations based on your operating system; however, some common locations include:

• macOS: $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin
• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin
• GNU / Linux Distributions: $HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin or $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin

You could also find the composer’s global installation path by running composer global about and looking up from the first line.

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:

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:^7.0 blog

Local Development Server

If you have PHP installed locally and you would like to use PHP’s built-in development server to serve your application, you may use the serve Artisan command. This command will start a development server at http://localhost:8000:

php artisan serve

More robust local development options are available via Homestead and Valet.

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