Laravel Tutorial for Beginners: Chapter 1 – Your Journey Starts Here

Welcome to your first step in mastering Laravel, the most popular PHP framework for building powerful, scalable, and elegant web applications. This is Chapter 1 of our “Get Hands-On with Laravel” series, crafted to help you understand Laravel from the ground up through practical, beginner-friendly tutorials.

In this chapter, we’ll walk you through everything you need to set up a Laravel project, understand its folder structure, and get your first Laravel application running.

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Why Laravel? Top Reasons Developers Love It

Before diving in, let’s explore why Laravel development is the preferred choice for developers across the globe:

• Clean and Expressive Syntax: Laravel’s elegant syntax makes PHP development simple, readable, and efficient.
• Built-in Features: Enjoy powerful tools like routing, templating (Blade), migrations, Eloquent ORM, authentication, and more — right out of the box.
• Large Community Support: Laravel’s active developer community ensures you’re never stuck — find tutorials, packages, and forums with ease.
• Security Ready: Laravel protects against common threats like XSS and SQL injection with built-in security features.
• Scalable Architecture: Laravel scales effortlessly — whether you’re building a small site or an enterprise-grade application.
• Powered by Composer: Laravel uses Composer to manage packages and dependencies, simplifying your development workflow.

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What You Need Before You Start Laravel

To get started with Laravel, ensure your development environment includes the following:

✅ PHP (8.1 or higher)

Run php -v in your terminal to check your PHP version.

✅ Composer (Dependency Manager for PHP)

Install Composer from getcomposer.org and verify with composer -v.

✅ Web Server

Use Apache, Nginx, or PHP’s built-in development server.

✅ Database

Laravel supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and others. Choose one that fits your project.

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Installing Laravel: Step-by-Step Guide

Follow these simple steps to create your first Laravel application:

1. Open your terminal.
2. Navigate to the directory where you want to install your Laravel project.
3. Run one of the following Composer commands:

To install the latest version:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel your-project-name

To install a specific Laravel version (e.g., 9.x):

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel:^9.0 your-project-name

4. Once installation is complete, go into your project directory:

cd your-project-name

🎉 You’ve now installed a fresh Laravel application!

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Understanding Laravel Project Structure

Laravel follows a clean and organized folder structure. Here’s a quick overview:

• app/: Core application logic (Controllers, Models, etc.)
• bootstrap/: Application bootstrap files
• config/: Configuration settings
• database/: Migrations, seeders, factories
• public/: Entry point of the application (index.php)
• resources/: Views, language files, raw assets
• routes/: Application routes (web.php, api.php)
• storage/: Logs, compiled templates, file storage
• tests/: Application tests
• vendor/: Composer dependencies
• .env: Environment settings
• artisan: Laravel CLI for powerful commands

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Running Laravel Locally

Use Laravel’s built-in server for local development:

php artisan serve

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser — you should see the Laravel welcome page!

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What’s Next in Your Laravel Journey?

You’ve successfully completed the first chapter of your Laravel tutorial. You’ve installed Laravel, set up your development environment, and taken a first look at its architecture.

👉 In Chapter 2, we’ll dive into Laravel routing, Blade templates, controllers, and database migrations.

Stay tuned and keep building with Laravel!

Laravel Demystified: Your Essential Guide to Routing, Blade, Controllers, and Migrations (Chapter 2)