Brief Introduction to Laravel : The popular php framework

What is Laravel ?

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Laravel attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, queueing, and caching.

Laravel is accessible, yet powerful, providing tools needed for large, robust applications. A superb inversion of control container, expressive migration system, and tightly integrated unit testing support give you the tools you need to build any application with which you are tasked.

Steps to setup Laravel

Here are the steps to setup Laravel on a windows machine. This will help you get started with using Laravel ASAP.

1. Open terminal, go to folder where php.exe exists, for my machine it is c:\xampp\php\

2. Install composer (https://getcomposer.org).

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It enables you to declare the required libraries for your project and will install them in your project.

Type the following command:

php -r “readfile(‘https://getcomposer.org/installer’);” | php

This will make ‘composer’ get installed in the same folder. You should see the file composer.phar there.

3.Next, download the laravel installer using composer

Type the command:

php composer.phar global require “laravel/installer=~1.1”

This would change the directory to your default user directory. You need to note that as it will be printed out in the command when installation begins.

This path should have this folder structure ‘composer/vendor/bin’.

4. Copy this complete path and add it your PATH environment variable.
so that you can access laravel from anywhere in terminal.

5. Once installed, the command ‘laravel new’ will create a fresh laravel installation in the directory you want.

for example, the command ‘laravel new blog’, will create a new directory ‘blog’ having latest laravel installation and dependencies installed.

6. Create a folder ‘laravel’ inside htdocs folder. Create first laravel project (rename project_name to your project name)

Go to this folder C:\xampp\htdocs\laravel

Type this command:

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

And that’s it ! You are done !