Get Running With Laravel on Ubuntu Ultra-Fast

IMPORTANT: This content is over 1 year old, and may now be obsolete, irrelevant and/or no longer accurate.

This is just a very quick guide to get a fresh Ubuntu install working with Laravel. It doesn’t use Apache2, but the web server capability of PHP5. It’s not a comprehensive guide, and it doesn’t go into setting up and installing a full LAMP stack, so there will be no MySQL - this is meant as a base to work from for more front-end AngularJS experimentation.

First, install PHP5 and necessary modules (Ubuntu 12.10 comes with PHP 5.4)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install curl
sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt

Secondly we need to install composer which is used to install and update GitHub projects - like Laravel:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer`

Lastly we create the project (I go to “~/Documents/Projects” for this):

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

Lastly go to your newly created project folder and start the server (which, by default, can be seen at http://localhost:8000):

cd project_name
php artisan serve