AK

How to install Laravel 10

Ashutosh Kukreti -

Why Laravel?

Laravel is a popular open-source PHP web application framework that provides developers with a wide range of tools and features to help them build robust, scalable, and maintainable web applications. It was created by Taylor Otwell in 2011 and has since gained a large and active community of developers.

Laravel is built on top of several powerful PHP libraries, such as Symfony and Illuminate, and it incorporates many modern features and best practices, such as dependency injection, routing, and middleware. It also provides a variety of useful tools, such as a built-in command-line interface (CLI), an object-relational mapper (ORM), and a templating engine.

There are several reasons why developers choose to use Laravel, including:

  1. MVC Architecture: Laravel follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, making it easy to separate business logic from presentation and enhancing the application's maintainability.
  2. Artisan CLI: Laravel comes with an in-built command-line interface, Artisan, which simplifies repetitive tasks such as database migrations, testing, and even generating boilerplate code.
  3. Eloquent ORM: Laravel's Eloquent ORM makes database operations simple and efficient by providing an easy-to-use syntax to interact with databases.
  4. Blade Templating Engine: Laravel's Blade templating engine enables developers to create reusable templates and enhance code reusability.
  5. Security: Laravel comes with built-in security features such as encryption, password hashing, and CSRF protection to keep your application secure.

Laravel is used by developers to build various types of applications, including e-commerce sites, content management systems (CMS), and web applications. Laravel's powerful features and ease of use make it an excellent choice for developers looking to create complex web applications quickly and efficiently.

Pre-Requisites

Before installing Laravel, make sure that your system meets the following requirements:

  1. PHP Version: Laravel requires PHP version 8 or higher.
  2. Web Server: You need a web server such as Apache, Nginx, or Caddy to serve the application. Laravel comes with the inbuilt development server also, we'll use it for further tutorials.
  3. Database: Laravel supports multiple database management systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and SQL Server. You should have at least one of these databases installed and configured.
    PS:- We'll use MySQL for this series.
  4. Composer: Laravel uses Composer as a package manager to manage its dependencies. Therefore, you need to have Composer installed on your system.
  5. Other Requirements: Laravel also requires some other PHP extensions to be installed such as OpenSSL, Mbstring, Tokenizer, JSON, and Ctype.

Once you have all these prerequisites installed, you can proceed with the Laravel installation process.

Composer Installation

To install Composer on your system, you can follow the steps below:

  1. Go to https://getcomposer.org/download/ and follow the instructions for your operating system.
  2. For Linux and macOS, open a terminal window and execute the following command to download and install Composer:
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
  1. For Windows, you can download the Composer setup executable file from the website and run it.
  2. Once Composer is installed, you can verify its installation by running the following command in a terminal window:
composer --version

This should display the version number of Composer installed on your system.

PHP installation

The process for installing PHP depends on your operating system. Here are the instructions for installing PHP on Linux, macOS, and Windows:

Linux

  1. Open a terminal window and update the package list:

sudo apt-get update

  1. Install PHP and its extensions:

sudo apt-get install php

  1. You can verify the installation by running the following command:

php -v

This should display the version number of PHP installed on your system.

macOS

  1. Install Homebrew package manager by following the instructions on the website: https://brew.sh/
  2. Open a terminal window and run the following command to install PHP:

brew install php

  1. You can verify the installation by running the following command:

php -v

This should display the version number of PHP installed on your system.

Windows

  1. Download the PHP zip package from the official website: https://windows.php.net/download/
  2. Extract the contents of the zip package to a folder on your system.
  3. Add the folder to the system's PATH environment variable.
  4. You can verify the installation by opening a Command Prompt window and running the following command:

php -v

This should display the version number of PHP installed on your system.

Now we are ready to install the Laravel.

Installation

You can install Laravel using Composer by following the steps below:

  1. Open a terminal or command prompt window.
  2. Navigate to the directory where you want to install Laravel.
  3. Run the following command to create a new Laravel project:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel your_project_name
  1. Wait for Composer to download and install all the necessary packages and dependencies.
  2. Once the installation is complete, you can navigate to the project directory using the following command:
cd your_project_name
  1. Run the following command to start the development server:
php artisan serve

This will start the Laravel development server, and you can access your application by going to http://localhost:8000 in your web browser.

That's it! You have successfully installed Laravel on your system.

See you in the next article.