Laravel: Up and Running

Chapter 2. Setting Up a Laravel Development Environment

Part of PHP’s success has been because it’s hard to find a web server that can’t serve PHP. However, modern PHP tools have stricter requirements than those of the past. The best way to develop for Laravel is to ensure a consistent local and remote server environment for your code, and thankfully, the Laravel ecosystem has a few tools for this.

System Requirements

Everything we’ll cover in this chapter is possible with Windows machines, but you’ll need dozens of pages of custom instructions and caveats. I’ll leave those instructions and caveats to actual Windows users, so the examples here and in the rest of the book will focus on Unix/Linux/Mac OS developers.

Whether you choose to serve your website by installing PHP and other tools on your local machine, serve your development environment from a virtual machine via Vagrant, or rely on a tool like MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP, your development environment will need to have all of the following installed in order to serve Laravel sites:

• PHP >= 5.6.4 for Laravel 5.3 or PHP >= 5.5.9 for 5.1 and 5.2

• OpenSSL PHP extension

• PDO PHP extension

• Mbstring PHP extension

• Tokenizer PHP extension

Composer

Whatever machine you’re developing on will need to have Composer installed globally. If you’re not familiar with Composer, it’s a tool that’s at the foundation of most modern PHP development. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP, much like NPM for Node or RubyGems for Ruby. You’ll ...