Setting up Laravel Spark for local development

2 min readMay 27, 2020

Spark is a Laravel package that provides scaffolding for a SaaS application and includes billing, subscriptions, authentication, payment, etc.

The instructions below are for setting up a Laravel Spark application (Spark v10.0) for local development on MacOS.

I’m assuming the following:

you already have a local development environment suitable for running Laravel applications. For more information check out the Laravel docs
you have purchased a licence and have received your token

Before we start, ensure you are running PHP 7.3
At time of writing (May, 2020) the Spark installer fails on PHP 7.4.

1. Install or upgrade the Laravel Installer

composer global require laravel/installer

Ensure you have >= 2.3.0 of the Laravel Installer installed.

git clone https://github.com/laravel/spark-installer.git

Change into the spark-installer directory and run composer install

Next, add the Spark Installer directory to your PATH

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/spark-installer

Add your token (from purchasing a Spark licence)

spark register <<token>>

Next, run the Spark installer
Note: it will create a new directory in whatever location you run the command

spark new <<project name>>

Edit your .env file and add your projects settings, especially DB credentials.

Then, run the Spark migrations

php artisan migrate

As per the Spark docs, link the storage directory with

php artisan storage:link

You should now be able to load the site in your browser!

Edit the app/Providers/SparkServiceProvider.php file and add your email address to the $developers array.

Then, use the Register feature on the site to create an account, with that same email address.

Once this account has been created you’ll be able to see the Kiosk option on the top right menu under your Profile name.

Note: You can find all the Spark URLs via the routes file spark/src/Http/routes.php

More Spark tutorials

Setting up Stripe plans and Spark billing