Introduction to Laravel

Laravel is a free,open-source and a popular PHP web framework with expressive, elegant syntax based on the Model View Controller MVC architectural pattern . It is created by Taylor Otwell whom believes development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling.

Laravel attempts to reduce the cost of initial development and take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, queueing, and caching. Using Laravel, you can can save hours of development time and reduce thousand lines of code compared raw PHP. It is accessible, yet powerful, providing tools needed for large, robust applications.

The Dependency Manager for PHP

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It enables you to declare the required libraries for your project and will install them in your project.

Installing Composer

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

For Windows Users you can check here to install composer.

For Linux Users check here also....

Setting up a Laravel Project

Via Composer Create-Project

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

Via Laravel Installer

To install the laravel installer run:

composer global require "laravel/installer"

Now the you have the installer downloaded , this enables the laravel new command which will help us create a fresh laravel project. Example:

laravel new larablog

To know more about this powerful framework, you should spare some time and read the documentation .

Let's Know More about Laravel

Laravel PHP framework has evolved with series of frequent updates since its initial beta release on June 2011. Each version powered with new advanced features that makes Laravel stand out as a strongest contender to its rival frameworks CodeIgniter, Symfony, and Yii.

What's New in Laravel 5.5

• Automatic Package Discovery
• Fresh Migrations
• Frontend Presets
• Error Pages: Design Improvement
• Custom Error Reporting

You can read more on laravel 5.5 features by Hammad Ahmed

Laravel 5.6 is Out! What's New?

• Eloquent Date Casting
• Argon2i Password Hashing Algorithm Support
• Collision Package for CLI Error Reporting
• Bootstrap 4 ( Very Cool!)
• API Resource Controller Generation

You can read more on laravel 5.6 features by Christopher Vundi

And that’s it ! You are done !

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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