Laravel 3 Development Environment

This tutorial is a simplified approach to setup Laravel Development environment for Windows beginners. If you want to use XAMPP as the Apache and MySQL server package, follow this tutorial, http://setup-steps.blogspot.com/2013/01/laravel-virtual-host-on-xampp.html

LARAVEL DIRECTORY SETUP
1) Download Laravel Version 3
Browse URL https://github.com/laravel/laravel/tree/3.0
Click Download ZIP.


2) Unzip laravel-3.0.zip to C:\Z\


3) We will use UwAmp for running Apache and MySQL server.
If you haven't got UwAmp, download the server from here.

4) Register a development domain in Windows, e.g laravel.local
a) Open the file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
b) Add laravel.local to the line 127.0.0.1
c) save the file.
Note: if Windows doesn't allow you to save, reopen Notepad++ as an Admin user.

5) Create Virtual Host in UwAmp.

a) Click Apache Config

b) In Server Name textbox type: laravel.local

c) In Document Root textbox type: C:/Z/laravel-3.0/public/

d) Click OK. The item laravel.local *:80 will appear in Virtual Server list.

6) Browse URL http://laravel.local

LARAVEL DATABASE CONFIGURATION
1) Open [Laravel_Home]/application/config/database.php

2) Edit the connection setting.



3) Access MySql database via phpmyadmin. Create new database myfirstdb.
By default, the username/password is root/root.

LEARNING LARAVEL FRAMEWORK
Proceed to http://codehappy.daylerees.com/project-structure to explore more on Laravel Framework.