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Laravel is an open source widely used PHP Framework for web applications. It’s syntax, working principle is so much expressive and elegant. Development of web application in Laravel framework now a days very popular among developers.

Laravel is packed of strong features and/or module for the development environment.

Laravel first version was released at June 2011. Now, it’s Laravel 8 (8th Sept 2020). Every version of this framework brings lots of new features which reduces development effort and develop an application too much faster.

Learn More –

Inside this article we will see Laravel 8 Installation. This step by step guide helps you to understand about the Laravel system and application needed requirements before digging into application development.

Let’s get started.

System Requirements – Laravel 8 Framework

While working and/or developing any application in laravel 8 version. We should have some PHP and system configuration need.

Before going to Laravel 8 Installation, we have to make sure of these following configuration.

PHP & Server Configuration
Composer Installation

PHP & It’s Exentions

Here are some needed PHP and it’s extension needed configuration that we must need before go with Laravel 8.

PHP Version >= 7.3
BCMath PHP Extension
Ctype PHP Extension
Fileinfo PHP extension
JSON PHP Extension
Mbstring PHP Extension
OpenSSL PHP Extension
PDO PHP Extension
Tokenizer PHP Extension
XML PHP Extension

Server Requirement

You should have Apache or Nginx a web server in your system. According to your available operating system you need to install Either WAMP (Windows bases OS), XAMPP (Cross platoform OS), LAMP (Linux bases OS) servers to run PHP applications.

How to Install PHP >= 7.3?

Here, inside this article topic we will see about PHP >=7.3 installation. After installing we need to install it’s need extensions as well. I am having Ubuntu OS 18.04.

I am writing the step by step command which you need to execute in terminal for installation.

Need to check Ubuntu having latest packages and it’s modules, run following commands –

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade

Above command will install or updates system dependencies upto mark.

We need to Add PPA for PHP, run these following commands.

$ sudo apt install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
$ sudo apt update

Once PPA has been installed, now we can install PHP >=7.3 version in any of web server either on Nginx or Apache. Here we will discuss both.

PHP >= 7.3 FPM Installation in Nginx

To Install PHP v7.3 we need to run this given command.

$ sudo apt install php7.3-fpm

To install PHP v7.4 we need to run this command, only to change 7.3 to 7.4

$ sudo apt install php7.4-fpm

Install PHP >= 7.3 for Apache

For Apache installation, run this command to your terminal.

$ sudo apt install php7.3

And for PHP 7.4 we need to execute this.

$ sudo apt install php7.4

Successfully, we have installed PHP >= 7.3 version to system. Next we need to verify that.

Verification of PHP Installation

We have two options available to check PHP installation. These are the following ways to verify.

Using Command Line
Using PHP function

Verify by Command Line

Open terminal and type command, this command is for Apache.

$ php -v

Output

PHP 7.3.22-1+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 (cli) (built: Sep 9 2020 06:46:12) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.22, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.3.22-1+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

To verify for Nginx

$ php-fpm7.3 -v

Verify by PHP Function

You need to go at your localhost. Create a file with a name and with .php extension. Like I have created a file at root named as info.php

<?php
  
  phpinfo();

We need to run this file at browser. Open browser and type URL – http://localhost/info.php

Installation of PHP Extensions & Restart

Run this given command to install PHP v7.3 extensions.

We can also run each command from this syntax one by one. But we are going to run install all modules or extensions at once.

$ sudo apt install php7.3-common php7.3-mysql php7.3-xml php7.3-xmlrpc php7.3-curl php7.3-gd php7.3-imagick php7.3-cli php7.3-dev php7.3-imap php7.3-mbstring php7.3-opcache php7.3-soap php7.3-zip php7.3-intl -y

$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.3

Switch PHP version

If your system has any old version of PHP say 7.2. But now, you have installed the latest version. You need to switch your PHP version from 7.2 to 7.3. To switch version

Disable old PHP version & then Enable new PHP version

To disable old version, this command will help you.

$ sudo a2dismod php7.2

Enable new PHP version say 7.3

$ sudo a2enmod php7.3

Next, all we need to restart application web server. This restart makes all changes to their correct settings.

Restarting Apache Server

$ sudo service apache2 restart

Restarting Nginx Server

$ sudo systemctl restart nginx

Composer Installation

We need to set firstly system dependencies and it’s packages at their latest version. Again same what we did above, needs to run this command.

$ sudo apt update

Next we are going to run command using cURL, you need to make sure you should curl extension enabled. Otherwise run this command to install.

$ sudo apt install curl php-cli php-mbstring git unzip

Back to home directory

$ cd ~

Download composer installer

$ php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

Generating hash value for composer installer

$ HASH="$(wget -q -O - https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)"

Verifying hash key and installer

$ php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '$HASH') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

Installing composer

$ sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

If suppose, you have any permission issue with composer file, assign by this

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Successfully, by following command Composer will be installed successfully. To test composer, back to terminal and type command

$ composer

Laravel 8 Installation

As from the following above steps, we have successfully installed PHP, it’s extension and composer.

Now, we can install Laravel 8 to system. Laravel Installation can be done in two ways.

Laravel Installer
By using composer

Laravel Installer

To install Laravel via Laravel installer, we need to install it’s installer first. We need to make use of composer for that.

$ composer global require laravel/installer

This command will install laravel installer at system. This installation is at global scope, so you type command from any directory at terminal. To verify type the given command –

$ laravel

This command will open a command palette of Laravel Installer.

To create ad install laravel project in system,

$ laravel new blog

With the name of blog a laravel project will be created at your specified path.

By using composer

Alternatively, we can also install Laravel by Composer command create-project. Here is the complete command to create a laravel project-

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

After following these steps we can install a Laravel 8 applicaton into system. To start the development server of Laravel –

$ php artisan serve

This command outputs –

Starting Laravel development server: http://127.0.0.1:8000

We hope this article helped you to learn Laravel 8 Installation in system in a very detailed way.

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