Beginner Guide to Install Laravel – In Easy Steps

Welcome to the Beginner Guide to Install Laravel on Your Operating System! Laravel is a very popular framework of PHP. Due to its unmatched simplicity and fast speed Laravel has become a need of every PHP developer.

Here we will be explaining installation of Laravel framework in very simple steps. This guide is very useful for Laravel learners at very beginner level. This guide is mainly targeted on installation for windows operating system.

By the end of this setup tutorial, you’ll have Laravel up and running on your system. You can start your web development journey of building dynamic web applications with one of the most popular PHP frameworks.

Before we move forward with installation, let’s first dive in some necessary prerequisites.

Pre-requisites to Install Laravel

Here are a few prerequisites that you need a lot for install Laravel:

1. PHP: The recommended version for PHP is 7.3 or higher than it with extensions like XML, OpenSSL, PDO, etc.
2. Composer: Composer is package manager for PHP. It sets the group for the installation of both Laravel and its dependencies.
3. Web Server: Along with PHP and Composer, web servers play a crucial role in the installation of Laravel. You can try adding web servers like Apache for the applications going to the run under Laravel.
4. Database: How can we forget database? Do you know that Laravel can work with multiple database systems but we will be using MySQL. 
5. Node.js and NPM: Although not required, Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager) are often used for front-end development tasks like compiling assets and managing JavaScript dependencies in Laravel projects. We may need it for SAAS integration with Laravel here.

To setup PHP, MySQL, Web Server on Windows I recommend to install WAMP or XAMP. These stacks will give you single click setup for all.

You must ensure, you have these prerequisites installed and configured correctly.

Steps to Install Laravel on Windows

To install Laravel on Windows, first, we have to download the composer from its website., As we’ve read above, it is a command line and will help us to install Laravel.

1. Installing composer

Download the composer from it’s official website, and start the setup. It will ask you to provide the PHP path as shown in the below image:

Then press next and install the composer, after installing it successfully we can check the version of the composer in the command prompt by using this command:

Composer - v

It will show some information as shown in below attached graphic for reference:

With this step, we’ve got everything set to install the Laravel in your operating system. 

Follow the provided steps with good attention for right installation: 

2. To install the Laravel we should use at least PHP 7.3 version while writing this

We can check the version of PHP in command prompt of windows by using:

 PHP –v command

3. Install Laravel

After downloading the composer and installing it in the windows, we have to start the installation process of the Laravel. We can follow the below-mentioned commands to install Laravel:

Composer create-project –prefer –dist laravel/laravel Project_Name

This command will install Laravel and also make a new project with the given name of the project.

4. Create the PHP database in MySQL

After installing Laravel, we have to create the database in the PHP server, just go to the MySQL server, create a new database.

5. Update. Env file

APP_NAME=Laravel 
APP_ENV=local 
APP_KEY=base64:TJ9Sob7KFPhL5XkqT+TyQux3x7UbW08QLb0xtirLWSs= 
APP_DEBUG=true 
APP_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8000 
LOG_CHANNEL=stack 
LOG_LEVEL=debug 
DB_CONNECTION=mysql 
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 
DB_PORT=3306 
DB_DATABASE=first-laravel 
DB_USERNAME=root 
DB_PASSWORD=

6. Migrate database

After creating the database for Laravel, we will create a migration table. To make a migration table we will use the command as:

php artisan migrates the above command 

This Command will create the pending migration changes to the database.

7. Start the development server of the Laravel

To start the server of the Laravel we have a command to run:

php artisan serve

This command will start the server of the Laravel, as we can see in the image reference below:

Now we are done. We can copy this localhost URL and paste it into the browser to check if it is working. We can see the welcome page of the Laravel like this.

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Conclusion on Beginner Guide to Install Laravel

That’s how we can install Laravel on a Windows OS successfully. Start with the composer installation and that will help us to install Laravel on our Windows operating system. Follow all of the above-mentioned steps to install Laravel. But make sure that, you already have a localhost server Installed like WAMP or XAMP.