Laravel Tutorials | Lesson 1: Installation

Server Requirements

The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. Of course, all of these requirements are satisfied by the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, so it's highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Laravel development environment.

However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:

                                      - PHP >= 7.0.0
                                      - OpenSSL PHP Extension
                                      - PDO PHP Extension
                                      - Mbstring PHP Extension
                                      - Tokenizer PHP Extension
                                      - XML PHP Extension

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 the $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your $PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system.

Via Composer Create-Project

You may install Laravel by issuing the Composer create-project command in your terminal:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel 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