Setting Up Laravel (Composer & Artisan)

Create a project

Laravel uses Composer (PHP’s package manager, like npm for PHP). Create a new app, then start it.

# install Composer first (getcomposer.org), then:
composer create-project laravel/laravel myapp

cd myapp
php artisan serve
# open http://localhost:8000

Let us read those four lines: composer create-project laravel/laravel myapp downloads a fresh Laravel app into a new folder called myapp. cd myapp moves into that folder. php artisan serve starts a small built-in web server so you can see your app. The last line is just a comment reminding you which address to open.

Artisan — your assistant

php artisan is Laravel’s command-line tool. It generates code, runs migrations, clears caches and more.

php artisan make:controller ProductController
php artisan make:model Product -m       # model + migration
php artisan migrate                      # run database migrations
php artisan route:list                   # see all routes

Each line asks artisan to do one job for you: make:controller creates a new controller file, make:model Product -m creates a model and its migration (the -m flag means "with migration"), migrate builds your tables in the database, and route:list prints every route in your app so you can check your URLs. You type these in the terminal, not in a browser.