Detailed instructions on getting laravel set up or installed.

composer is required for installing laravel easily.

There are 3 methods of installing laravel in your system:

1. Via Laravel Installer

   Download the Laravel installer using composer

   composer global require "laravel/installer"
   

   Before using composer we need to add ~/.composer/vendor/bin to PATH. After installation has finished we can use laravel new command to create a new project in Laravel.

   Example:

   laravel new {folder name}
   

   This command creates a new directory named as site and a fresh Laravel installation with all other dependencies are installed in the directory.

2. Via Composer Create-Project

   You can use the command in the terminal to create a new Laravel app:

   composer create-project laravel/laravel {folder name}
   

3. Via Download

   Download Laravel and unzip it.

   1. composer install
   2. Copy .env.example to .env via teminal or manually.

      cp .env.example .env
      

   3. Open .env file and set your database, email, pusher, etc. (if needed)
   4. php artisan migrate (if database is setup)
   5. php artisan key:generate
   6. php artisan serve
   7. Go to localhost:8000 to view the site

Laravel docs

Accessing pages and outputting data is fairly easy in Laravel. All of the page routes are located in app/routes.php. There are usually a few examples to get you started, but we're going to create a new route. Open your app/routes.php, and paste in the following code:

Route::get('helloworld', function () {
    return '<h1>Hello World</h1>';
});

This tells Laravel that when someone accesses http://localhost/helloworld in a browser, it should run the function and return the string provided.

Assuming we have a working laravel application running in, say, "mylaravel.com",we want our application to show a "Hello World" message when we hit the URL http://mylaravel.com/helloworld . It involves the creation of two files (the view and the controller) and the modification of an existing file, the router.

The view

First off , we open a new blade view file named helloview.blade.php with the "Hello World" string. Create it in the directory app/resources/views

<h1>Hello, World</h1>

The controller

Now we create a controller that will manage the display of that view with the "Hello World" string. We'll use artisan in the command line.

$> cd your_laravel_project_root_directory
$> php artisan make:controller HelloController 

That will just create a file (app/Http/Controllers/HelloController.php) containing the class that is our new controller HelloController.

Edit that new file and write a new method hello that will display the view we created before.

public function hello()
{
    return view('helloview'); 
}

That 'helloview' argument in the view function is just the name of the view file without the trailing ".blade.php". Laravel will know how to find it.

Now when we call the method hello of the controller HelloController it will display the message. But how do we link that to a call to http://mylaravel.com/helloworld ? With the final step, the routing.

The router

Open the existing file app/routes/web.php (in older laravel versions app/Http/routes.php) and add this line:

Route::get('/helloworld', 'HelloController@hello');

which is a very self-explaining command saying to our laravel app: "When someone uses the GET verb to access '/helloworld' in this laravel app, return the results of calling the function hello in the HelloController controller.