Laravel : from Github to localhost

Some useful (and badly documented) tricks to use an existing Laravel project locally without getting ugly cryptic errors.

Spoiler alert : this might prove useful when deploying to another server.

When using Laravel, you will often find yourself fetching a new project from Github to deploy it locally (e.g. when working in a team).

Unfortunately such an operation needs you to run some hard-to-find commands. Once again, I wandered a lot before finding these. Laravel is powerful and mostly-well-documented but all this nice magic comes with a cost.

Initiate the database

Change the database configuration in .env and app/config/database.php (assuming you want to use a local database which you already have created).

Open your terminal and run these commands :

composer install

(all dependencies are installed)

php artisan migrate

(create data tables)

php artisan db:seed

(run the seeds)

The trouble with ciphers

Suddenly, one of theses famous cryptic errors :

The only supported ciphers are AES-128-CBC and AES-256-CBC

Sure, why not…

Good news is you only have to run two commands to get rid of that :

php artisan key:generate
php artisan config:clear

After that, you can finally run your server locally.

php artisan serve

Enjoy!