Getting started with Laravel 5 and Composer: Initializing a new project

Laravel 4 had largely changed the way that PHP development happens. It saw the addition of package management through Composer, an overhaul of pagination routes, and some of the best "out-of-the-box" security seen in any PHP framework. The level of care and attention to detail made using Laravel 4.2 a ton of fun.

Laravel 5 changes things again. It was supposed to be a simple upgrade to 4.3, but a slew of new features were enough to call for a new major release. There were changes made to the directory structure, blade templates allow for escaped variables, facades are taking a front row seat, routing receive the addition of middleware, and Artisan has tons of new generators. I plan on covering some of these new feature in upcoming posts.

For this post, however, how does one even get started? Well, let's set up a basic Laravel 5 PHP project from scratch.

Install Composer

• Mac/Linux setup steps
• Windows setup steps

Composer configures packages from Packagist. Add a package like so:

composer require "vendor/package": "version@branch"

Package dependencies are automatically included and installed as listed in the composer.lock file. These are installed into the {project root}/vendor folder.

Install Laravel 5 with Composer

composer create-project laravel/laravel mylaravel5project

Boot up Laravel 5 homepage

Can be done with PHP's built-in webserver, document root set to the Laravel project's public folder:

cd mylaravel5project
php -S localhost:8888 -t public

Now open http://localhost:8888 in your browser. If this doesn't work, it is likely a PHP5-mcrypt dependency that's missing, so be sure to add that. Alternatively, use a virtual machine such as Homestead.