Installing Laravel on Windows

I wrote an article on Installing LAMP environment on ubuntu cloud instance that somebody found helpful and he requested me to write for Laravel installation and configuration for Windows development machine. So here is step by step guide.

XAMPP:

I assume you have XAMPP or equivalent installed and running. If not then download it from https://www.apachefriends.org/download.html

 Composer:

Then second thing you should have is composer. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. To check if you already have composer installed, open command prompt and type following command and hit enter:

composer –version

If you see composer version then it is installed, but if you don’t see that and instead see:

‘composer’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

Then you need to install composer. So download and install composer by following steps from here: https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-windows

Installing Laravel via Composer:

We will install Laravel using composer. But first you need to switch to your www root directory.  For XAMPP it will be htdocs folder in your xampp directory.

Type following command in command prompt and hit enter:

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

This will start downloading laravel and its dependencies that may take few minutes.

And it is installed. To test it hit:

http://localhost/laravel/public/

And you should see Laravel welcome screen. Once you have Laravel installed and running, Laravel website has a good documentation that you can follow. And if you want even better source than that, Laracasts is the place to start.