Laravel 5 Installation and Configuration for the beginner

Introduction

In this tutorial, we are going to look at how to install Laravel, configure Laravel and explore the directories of Laravel. We will work with a windows machine in this tutorial but the knowledge can still be applied to other operating systems such as Linux based OS, Mac OS etc.

Topics to be covered

We will cover the following topics.

Pre-requisites for installing Laravel
How to install Laravel using composer
How to check if Laravel installed correctly
Laravel directory structure
Configuring a new Laravel project

Pre-requisites for installing Laravel

Before installing Laravel, ensure that you have the following programs already installed 1. Web server 2. PHP 3. MySQL 4. Composer 5. Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Web Server, PHP & MySQL

For this tutorial, we will use XAMPP. XAMPP comes with Apache, MySQL and PHP. The good news is XAMPP is cross platform. If you do not have XAMPP, you can download it from this link. If you prefer working with other types of web servers i.e. IIS, Laravel built in web server, feel free to use them but for these tutorials’ sake, I recommend you work with XAMPP. Installing XAMPP on windows is like installing any windows program. We will not cover how to install it in this tutorial.

Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. You can read more about composer from their official website. You can download composer from this link. We will not cover how to install composer in this tutorial.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

This is optional but highly recommended. We will need an IDE to write code. IDE will make you more productive compared to using a plain text editor. I will be using NetBeans IDE for these tutorials. You can download NetBeans IDE from this link.

How to install Laravel using composer

This section assumes you have already installed composer. In this section, we will;

browse to htdocs in XAMPP or where path to the web server where you want to create
create a new Laravel project using composer
test new Laravel project creation in web browser

Step 1: browse to web server root

Assuming you installed XAMPP to C:/xampp/, open C:/xampp/htdocs using windows explorer
Right click anywhere in C:/xampp/htdocs and select use composer here as shown in the image below.

Select use composer here. You will get the following command prompt window

Step 2: Create new Laravel project using composer

run the following command

composer create-project laravel/laravel larashop

You will get the following output in the command prompt

Wait for the installation to complete

Step 3: Test installation

Browser to the following URL in your web browser.

If you do not get the above welcome page, use the comments section below to share what you get and we will help you out with whatever challenges you will face.

Laravel directory structure

The following table briefly explains the key Laravel directories that you must know about

S/N	DIRECTORY	DESCRIPTION
1	/app	contains all of your application code
2	/app/Console	contains all of your artisan commands
3	/app/Events	contains event classes
4	/app/Exceptions	contains exception handling classes
5	/app/Http	contains controllers, filters, and requests
6	/app/Jobs	contains jobs that can be queued
7	/app/Listeners	contains handler classes for events
8	/bootstrap	contains files required by the bootstrap framework
9	/config	contains the application configuration files
10	/database	Contains database migrations and seeds. It is also used to store the database for SQLite
11	/public	contains the front controllers and assets such as images, CSS, JavaScript etc.
12	/storage	contains compiled blade templates, filed based sessions, etc.
13	/tests	contains automated unit tests
14	/vendor	contains composer dependencies

Configuring a new Laravel project

Application configuration

The application configuration information is located in /config/app.php. In this section, we are going to;

Set the debugging mode – the debugging mode is used to determine how much information should be displayed when an error occurs.
Set the time zone – this setting is used for PHP date and date-time functions.
Application key – this value is used for encryption purposes.

Debugging mode

Open the file <code class=”sunlight-highlight-php”/config/app.php
Locate the following code

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', false),

Update it to the following code

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', true),

HERE,

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', true), sets debug mode to true. This will make Laravel display detailed information when an error occurs. The detailed information is useful for troubleshooting purposes.

Time zone

Locate the following code

'timezone' => 'UTC',

HERE,

'timezone' => 'UTC', sets the time zone to UTC. This is the default value If you would like to have a different time zone, you can replace UTC with a value of your preferred time zone.

Application Key

Locate the following code

'key' => env('APP_KEY', 'SomeRandomString'),

Update it to the following code

'key' => env('APP_KEY', 'inesindinemwanawabambuyabakoiwe'),

HERE,

'inesindinemwanawabambuyabakoiwe' is a 32 character string that will be used as an encryption key.

Other settings

You can explore /config/app.php to see the various settings that are available in it.

Authentication configuration

The authentication configuration file is located in /config/auth.php. We will leave the default values as they are. If you want you can change them to meet your requirements.

Database configuration

The database configuration file is located in /config/database.php. By default, MySQL will be used as the database engine. You can set it to a different database management system if you want but for this tutorial, we will leave the default value.

We will update the following keys;

database
username
password

Locate the following lines

'mysql' => [
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
    'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
    'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
    'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => '',
    'strict'    => false,
],

Update the above code to the following

'mysql' => [
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
    'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'larashop'),
    'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'root'),
    'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', 'melody'),
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => '',
    'strict'    => false,
],

HERE,

'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'larashop'), sets the database name to larashop. You can go ahead and create an empty database larashop in MySQL.
'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'root'), sets root as the database username that will be used for authentication. You should use a valid username for your MySQL instance.
'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', 'melody'), sets melody as the password that will be used to login. You should use a valid password for your MySQL instance.

Summary

In this tutorial, we looked at;

The pre-requisites for installing Laravel. Composer, Web server, PHP and MySQL plus an IDE for coding
Laravel project directories structure
How to configure a new Laravel project.