Installation

    The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. Of course, all of these requirements are satisfied by the 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:

    • OpenSSL PHP Extension
    • PDO PHP Extension
    • Mbstring PHP Extension
    • Tokenizer PHP Extension

    Laravel utilizes to manage its dependencies. So, before using Laravel, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.

    Via Laravel Installer

    Make sure to place the directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system.

    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. This method of installation is much faster than installing via Composer:

    Via Composer Create-Project

    Alternatively, you may also install Laravel by issuing the Composer command in your terminal:

    After installation, you should configure your application's document / web root to the public directory.

    Directory Permissions

    After installing Laravel, you may need to configure some permissions. Directories within the storage and the bootstrap/cache directories should be writable by your web server or Laravel will not run. If you are using the Homestead virtual machine, these permissions should already be set.

    Application Key

    The next thing you should do after installing Laravel is set your application key to a random string. If you installed Laravel via Composer or the Laravel installer, this key has already been set for you by the command. Typically, this string should be 32 characters long. The key can be set in the .env environment file. If you have not renamed the .env.example file to .env, you should do that now. If the application key is not set, your user sessions and other encrypted data will not be secure!

    Additional Configuration

    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 and locale that you may wish to change according to your application.

    You may also want to configure a few additional components of Laravel, such as:

    Once Laravel is installed, you should also .