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.
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 command to install all of the framework's dependencies.
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
keyoption 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.
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
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]