This tutorial is for laravel 4. For laravel 5, visit this

Overview

What is laravel?

Laravel is a free, open source PHP web application framework, designed for the development of model–view–controller (MVC) web applications. Laravel is released under the MIT license, with its source code hosted on GitHub.

What is xampp?

XAMPP is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

Requirements

• xampp
• composer
• mcrypt

Setup

• First, Download xampp. Then, you need to setup xampp and change its security settings. Execute,

    chmod 755 xampp-linux-*-installer.run
    sudo ./xampp-linux-*-installer.run
  

  This will open the installer and just click “next” and it will install xampp files in /opt/lampp folder. You should first check if lampp is functioning properly. To test this,

    sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
  

  Let it start everything for you. Now just go to http://localhost and see it is working. We will need to setup security settings as well.

    sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security
  

  Set all the passwords etc, and you are done!

• Now you need to get composer

    curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
    sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
  

  If you still get an error, please refer to composer website.

• Now you need to get important dependencies of laravel - mcrypt.

    sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt php5-json
  

  And now run,

    sudo php5enmod mcrypt
  

  To make sure it is running,

    php -i | grep mcrypt
  

  It will output

    .......
    mcrypt support => enabled
    mcrypt_filter support => enabled
    .......
  

• Let us create an app - cd into /opt/lampp/htdocs and mkdir laravel-projects. Then finally cd laravel-projects. Now execute below command to create a fresh project.

    sudo composer.phar create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist
  

  It’s gonna take its time. Just wait for it to finish. Once it is done, execute

    sudo chmod -R 775 app/storage
  

• Now you can modify app/config/app.php to change locale, timezone, debug (to ‘true’ - for viewing errors) etc.

Testing

To test, Just go to http://localhost/larvel-project/laravel/public/ , you will see a page with “You have arrived.” as shown below.

Or you can simply run

    sudo php artisan serve

and visit http://localhost:8000 you will see a page with “You have arrived.” as shown below.

That’s it. Now you can start developing awesome apps.

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