🐱‍👤 Laravel - Installation

Installing Laravel (The Right Way)

Wait... What is Composer? 

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Think of it like npm (for Node.js) or pip (for Python).
It handles all the PHP packages your app depends on — including Laravel itself. You don’t want to manually download and update every library, right? Composer handles that headache for you. 

Why use Composer?

• It automatically downloads libraries and dependencies.
• Keeps all your packages organized in a composer.json file.
• One command to install or update everything. Magic! 🧙‍♂️
• Laravel and most modern PHP frameworks require it.

Step 1: Install Composer

👉 Download Composer from the official site: getcomposer.org/download

For Windows:

• Download the Composer-Setup.exe
• Run it, and let it install globally
• Open command prompt and type: composer -V — You should see the version!

For macOS/Linux:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php composer-setup.php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
composer -V
  

Step 2: Install Laravel

You can install Laravel globally or use the Laravel installer, but the most common and cleanest method is using Composer.

composer create-project laravel/laravel myApp
  

⬆️ This command will:

• Create a new folder myApp
• Download all the Laravel files
• Set up a full Laravel project ready to go 🚀

Start the Laravel server:

cd myApp
php artisan serve
  

Open your browser and go to: http://localhost:8000

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Now you’ve got Laravel running locally. Time to build something awesome!