Laravel installation: Composer, requirements, and new project

Home page: open_in_new https://laravel.com .

There are many ways to install Laravel.

Using Composer

There is a starter template for Laravel applications in Packagist. So you can install it using Composer and the create-project command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel .

It will install the starter files, and composer.json with the next dependencies:

"require": {
    "php": "^8.2",
    "laravel/framework": "^12.0",
    "laravel/tinker": "^2.10.1"
},
"require-dev": {
    "fakerphp/faker": "^1.23",
    "laravel/pail": "^1.2.2",
    "laravel/pint": "^1.13",
    "laravel/sail": "^1.41",
    "mockery/mockery": "^1.6",
    "nunomaduro/collision": "^8.6",
    "phpunit/phpunit": "^11.5.3"
}

As well as a series of commands will be executed (take a look at the scripts section of the composer.json file).

Let’s take Docker

With Docker, it can be more simple because we don’t need to install PHP and Composer on the local machine.

Also, instead of using the official Composer image, I will prefer to use images created by the Laravel team (open_in_new laravelsail ). This way we will avoid situations when some PHP extensions are missing.

docker run --rm \
    --interactive \
    --tty \
    --volume "$(pwd):/var/www/html" \
    --workdir /var/www/html \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    laravelsail/php84-composer \
    composer create-project laravel/laravel .

Currently, Docker Hub has the next images from this organization:

• laravelsail/php84-composer
• laravelsail/php83-composer
• laravelsail/php82-composer
• laravelsail/php81-composer
• laravelsail/php80-composer
• laravelsail/php74-composer
• laravelsail/php73-composer

Using Laravel Sail

Laravel Sail is a light-weight command-line interface for interacting with Laravel’s default Docker development environment.

At its heart, Sail is the docker-compose.yml file and the sail script that is stored at the root of your project. The sail script provides a CLI with convenient methods for interacting with the Docker containers defined by the docker-compose.yml file.

Installation:

curl -s https://laravel.build/example-app | bash

curl -s https://laravel.build/example-app?with=mysql,redis | bash

curl -s https://laravel.build/example-app?with=none | bash

Adding an alias for Sail:

alias sail='[ -f sail ] && sh sail || sh vendor/bin/sail'

Commands

sail up

sail stop

Debugging

To start using xdebug, add the next string to the .env file:

SAIL_XDEBUG_MODE=debug

Using Laravel Installer

There is a package in Packagist that helps install Laravel and different Starter Kits for Laravel:

composer global require laravel/installer

Install Laravel:

# If we install it globally:
laravel new example-app

# If we install it locally:
php vendor/bin/laravel new example-app

This tool is interactive and will ask you a couple of question about what you want to install.

We can use the open_in_new docker-laravel-installer to speed up the process:

docker run --rm -it \
  -v "$(pwd):/app" \
  -u $(id -u):$(id -g) \
  steadfast/docker-laravel-installer \
  new example