Introduction to Laravel and Installation — a practical guide to Laravel installation with clear examples you can reuse in real projects.
Laravel Tutorial Series (1/27). Prefer one page? Read the complete Laravel tutorial (all 27 topics).
Short description
Laravel is a popular PHP framework for building modern web applications with clean architecture, routing, Blade views, Eloquent ORM, and built-in tools for auth, queues, and testing.
What you will learn
• What Laravel is
• System requirements
• How to install Laravel with Composer
• How to start the development server
Requirements
• PHP 8.2+ (check your Laravel version docs)
• Composer
• MySQL / MariaDB / SQLite
• Node.js (optional, for Vite assets)
Step 1 — Check PHP and Composer
php -v
composer -V
Step 2 — Create a new Laravel project
composer create-project laravel/laravel blog-app
cd blog-app
Step 3 — Start the local server
php artisan serve
Open `http://127.0.0.1:8000` in your browser.
Step 4 — Environment file
Copy `.env.example` to `.env` (Composer usually does this) and generate the app key:
php artisan key:generate
Example: welcome route already works
Laravel ships with `routes/web.php`:
<?php
use IlluminateSupportFacadesRoute;
Route::get('/', function () {
return view('welcome');
});
Quick tip
Use Laravel Herd, Valet, or Sail if you prefer managed local environments.