Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks that provides excellent resources for creating web applications. To get started with Laravel, the first step is to create a new project. This process is generally simple and quick, but familiarity with the necessary steps can help reduce potential issues.
You must first ensure that Composer is installed on your system. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP and is essential for managing packages and libraries in Laravel. If Composer is not installed, you can easily download and install it from its official website.
After installing Composer, you can use the command 'composer create-project' to create a new project. This command sets up the necessary Laravel dependencies and configurations as a standard installation and installs all required dependencies. This allows your application to be immediately operational.
Additionally, Laravel includes a CLI tool named Artisan, which provides necessary commands for creating and managing various aspects of your projects. For instance, you can use Artisan to create controllers, models, or migrations.
After creating the project, you can run the local Laravel server by using 'php artisan serve'. This server allows you to easily observe and test your application in a browser.
With all the Laravel tools, you can develop a highly complex and scalable application in a short amount of time. Now let’s look at a simple code example for creating a Laravel project.
<!-- Create a new Laravel project -->
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel myapp
<!-- Run the local Laravel server -->
cd myapp
php artisan servecomposer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel myapp
Using this command, a new Laravel project named 'myapp' is created, which will also install all necessary dependencies.
cd myapp
This command will navigate into the newly created project directory.
php artisan serve
Executing this command will run the local Laravel server, allowing your project to be accessible for viewing in a web browser.