Learn Laravel 11 from scratch with detailed explanations and examples.

Laravel 11 For Beginners

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks in web development today. With its modern approach, high flexibility, and powerful features that simplify web application development, Laravel has become a top choice for both beginners and professionals.

**Laravel 11 For Beginners** is a carefully designed course for anyone eager to start their journey in web development using Laravel. Throughout this course, you’ll explore the fundamental concepts of Laravel, from installation to building a simple, fully functional web application.

This course offers step-by-step guidance with clear explanations and practical code examples. You don’t need advanced knowledge of PHP or experience with other frameworks—basic programming skills are all you need to get started.

### Who Should Take This Course?

*   Beginners exploring Laravel or web development for the first time.
*   PHP developers looking to adopt a modern framework.
*   Anyone interested in quickly and efficiently creating web applications.


Intro and Static Pages

Introduction

In this first lesson, we will create a new project using Laravel. The official Laravel documentation on the [installation page](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/installation) provides detailed guidance. However, there are multiple ways to install Laravel.

The official documentation primarily focuses on a tool called **Laravel Sail**, which is built on [Docker](https://www.docker.com/). However, in this course, we won’t be using Sail. This is because Sail requires at least basic knowledge of Docker, and we want to keep things simple for beginners.

My personal preference for this course is to use the [Laravel Installer](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/installation#creating-a-laravel-project).

Before we proceed with the installer, let’s make sure your machine is properly set up.

***

## Setting Up Your Computer: Composer and a Web Server

To install Laravel, the first step is to install [Composer](https://getcomposer.org) on your machine. Composer will be used to manage Laravel’s dependencies and packages.

Next, you’ll need a **PHP web server** installed on your machine. Depending on your operating system, there are several bundled tools available that include essential components like Nginx/Apache, PHP, MySQL, and more for PHP web projects. Some popular options include:

*   **Laravel Herd** (macOS)
*   **Laravel Valet** (macOS/Linux)
*   **Laragon** or **XAMPP** (Windows)

On my machine, I’ll be using [Laragon](https://laragon.org), as it’s my preferred setup.

> **Note**: Laravel 11 requires PHP version **8.2** or higher.

***

## Install and Launch Laravel

First, you need to install the Laravel Installer globally using Composer. Run the following command:

```bash
composer global require laravel/installer
```

After the installation, you can create a new Laravel project using the following command:

```bash
laravel new example-app
```

This will create a new folder named `example-app` with all the necessary Laravel files inside.

For simplicity, let’s create a project named `project`:

```bash
laravel new project
```

This command will create a new Laravel project inside a `project` folder.

If you're using Laragon, it will automatically generate a local domain like `project.test`, which you can open directly in your browser.

***

### Installation Options

When you run the Laravel Installer, you might be presented with a few options to customize your project setup:

1.  **Starter Kit**:\
    For now, do not select any starter kit like **Breeze** or **Jetstream**. We’ll cover these in later lessons.

2.  **Testing Framework**:\
    During this course, it doesn’t matter whether you choose **PHPUnit** or **Pest**. Testing will be discussed in a separate course.

3.  **Database Engine**:\
    You can choose **SQLite**, **MySQL**, or another database engine based on your preference.

***

### Default Database: SQLite

By default, Laravel uses [SQLite](https://www.sqlite.org) as its SQL database engine. Once the Laravel project is created, an SQLite database file will be automatically generated in the `database` folder. The database structure will be built from the Migration files, which we’ll discuss in more detail later in this course.


Muhammad Mauribi

Muhammad Mauribi

Laravel 11 For Beginners

Introduction

Install Laravel: Composer or Laravel Installer