Create laravel project on local machine

Today my wife asked me to set up laravel on her box, so she could finally start to learn some serious PHP.

Then I asked a question: “There must be tutorials or docs for such task. Have you check them all out?”

“Yes, I have. But the official site told me to install some vagrant thingy first, I don’t understand what that is and why.”

Then I briefly browsed the laravel doc, section installation. Truly, vagrant is a good option for experienced developer because of many reasons, but for starter, can you just help them to start an example laravel app?

Within 10 mins, including downloading and installing time, I already got an laravel instance running on her machine, without using any virtual machine or similar. following is how it was set up on OSX:

Install php and composer

If you don’t have php, composer and mysql, then just install them with:

$ brew install php56 mysql
$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Install laravel installer

$ composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"

Create a laravel app

$ laravel new myapp

Just start it

$ cd myapp
$ php artisan serve

yes, as this simple. I understand docs want learner to have the exactly same perfect env like an app would be deployed on. But for a total beginner, to actually start something is more important than knowing how it should be properly developed.