Setup Working Environment

Setup Development Environment

If you are here on this course willing to learn Laravel, I assume that you already have some experience in PHP and you quite probably have PHP Working environment setup locally. Here are two major options in terms of Laravel working environment setup.

Laravel Herd
Xampp

Laravel Herd

If you are on windows or on Mac you can setup your Laravel working environment using Laravel Herd.

Laravel Herd is a single program which combines PHP, Nginx web server, node.js and composer. If you buy a pro version the package will include MySql, Redis and few other useful services as well.

💡 Before you try to start your project using php artisan serve you should open php.ini file and change the following line, otherwise the project might not be started:

Change this variables_order = "EGPCS” into this variables_order = "GPCS”

Location of php.ini: C:\Users\Zura\.config\herd\bin\php83\php.ini

Xampp

Xampp is a package which contains php, apache web server, MySql and few other services. If you choose Xampp as a choice of your PHP environment you have to install composer and node.js separately, which is disadvantage compared to Herd. Another disadvantage of Xampp is that at the moment it does not have latest php version supported, However the advantage of xampp is that is supports MySQL and comes with PHPMyAdmin as well.

You can choose whichever you want. If you are on Linux you might install php, apache or nginx and MySQL as separate packages.

But we will not need MySQL, nginx and apache locally installed for this course, as we are going to use SQLite as a choice of the database and we are going to start the project with PHP’s built in server.

Setup Editor/IDE

There are two major players when speaking about editor/IDE for Laravel: PHPStorm and VSCode.

PHPStorm is paid product, but is the best choice for PHP. It has integrated all the tools you need for Laravel or PHP Development.

VSCode is free and open source, but you need to install couple of extensions to make it convenient for Laravel development. VsCode Extensions