Setup the project

Let's use composer to start our project.

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

cd mybackend

php artisan key:generate

This will create the scaffolding for your Laravel project; we're targeting Laravel 7.x in this book. Edit .env with your database settings. You can use several database backends. To get started quickly you can setup a SQLite database easily:

DB_CONNECTION=sqlite
DB_DATABASE=/your/path/database/database.sqlite

You need to create the SQLite file manually: touch /your/path/database/database.sqlite.

Serving the backend

Laravel provides a command for running PHP's builtin HTTP server, so you don't have to install a full server like Apache or Nginx for development. Run:

php artisan serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

TIP

Artisan is the command-line interface included with Laravel. It's useful for running commands that generate scaffolding or configure packages.

And open http://localhost:8000. You'll see a basic template webpage.

TIP

By using --host 0.0.0.0 you can acess the HTTP server from other machines, which is useful for testing with other devices. Otherwise you can only access with localhost.

Your application is up and running. If you are making changes to the frontend and using Mix to compile JS/CSS/etc, run this in another terminal:

yarn run watch