This is the first post about Laravel and as expected, we are going to start with the first step – the installation.

I am mainly developing on OS X, but for these tutorials I will write about using Window. To make things quicker, I will use XAMPP web server stack.

After we are ready with the installation, we can download and install Laravel. The framework offers different ways of installation – via Laravel Installer, via Download and via Composer. We will use the last way. If you don’t already have it installed, do so by installing Composer. Now you can open Terminal and go to the folder, where you want Laravel to be installed. Usually this is the htdocs folder of XAMPP. Once you are there, execute the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name --prefer-dist

where your-project-name should be replaced with the name of our project. On execution the command will create a folder named your-project-name within your current directory.

There are few system requirements for running Larave:

• PHP >= 5.3.7
• MCrypt PHP Extension

Additional information about installing Laravel can be found on the official site.

Once we finish the installtion process, we can check if it was successful by visiting http://localhost/your-project-name/public, where your-project-name is the name of the folder which you created.

In the next tutorial we will start with exploring the basics of the framework and some simple examples.

Next article: Starting with Laravel – Migrations and Seeding