Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. First, download a copy of the composer.phar. Once you have the PHAR archive, you can either keep it in your local project directory or move to usr/local/bin to use it globally on your system. On Windows, you can use the Composer Windows installer.
First, download the Laravel installer PHAR archive. For convenience, rename the file to laravel and move it to /usr/local/bin. Once installed, the simple laravel new command will create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For instance, laravel new blog would create a directory named blog containing a fresh Laravel installation with all dependencies installed. This method of installation is much faster than installing via Composer.
You may also install Laravel by issuing the Composer create-project command in your terminal:
composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist
Once Composer is installed, download the latest version of the Laravel framework and extract its contents into a directory on your server. Next, in the root of your Laravel application, run the php composer.phar install (or composer install) command to install all of the framework's dependencies. This process requires Git to be installed on the server to successfully complete the installation.
If you want to update the Laravel framework, you may issue the php composer.phar update command.
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements:
- PHP >= 5.3.7
- MCrypt PHP Extension
As of PHP 5.5, some OS distributions may require you to manually install the PHP JSON extension. When using Ubuntu, this can be done via apt-get install php5-json.
Laravel needs almost no configuration out of the box. You are free to get started developing! However, you may wish to review the app/config/app.php file and its documentation. It contains several options such as timezone and locale that you may wish to change according to your application.
Laravel may require one set of permissions to be configured: folders within app/storage require write access by the web server.
Several of the framework directory paths are configurable. To change the location of these directories, check out the bootstrap/paths.php file.
The framework ships with a public/.htaccess file that is used to allow URLs without index.php. If you use Apache to serve your Laravel application, be sure to enable the mod_rewrite module.
If the .htaccess file that ships with Laravel does not work with your Apache installation, try this one:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
On Nginx, the following directive in your site configuration will allow "pretty" URLs:
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}