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.
You may install Laravel by issuing the Composer create-project
command in your terminal:
composer create-project laravel/laravel
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
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.
Note: One configuration option you should be sure to set is the
key
option withinapp/config/app.php
. This value should be set to a 32 character, random string. This key is used when encrypting values, and encrypted values will not be safe until it is properly set. You can set this value quickly by using the following artisan commandphp artisan key:generate
.
Laravel requires 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.
Note: Laravel is designed to protect your application code, and local storage by placing only files that are necessarily public in the public folder. It is recommended that you either set the public folder as your site's documentRoot (also known as a web root) or to place the contents of public into your site's root directory and place all of Laravel's other files outside the web root.
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} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]