I mainly develop on Windows 7 and transfer any production code across to Linux machines for live environments. At some stage I’ll have to get around to using Vagrant to setup machines for me.
I install and use GIT for version control – http://git-scm.com/downloads
For code editing I’ve been using Sublime Text, but Jeffrey Way at Laracasts.com has been showing off PHPStorm and it looks pretty useful. I’ll be using the trial version to see if it’s worth investing in.
Composer is also required. I use the Windows installer – https://getcomposer.org/download/
The majority of databases I use are MySQL and I’ve pretty much stuck with PHPMyAdmin over the years. But of late I’ve been using HeidiSQL which is not browser based and pretty powerful and freeware! You can find it here – http://www.heidisql.com/
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Laravel Learning
Here are some of the Laravel resources on the web that I’ve found helpful over the past few months.
- Laracast.com from Jeffrey Way. A comprehensive set of lessons & tutorials. Subscribe… it’s worth it.
- Culttt.com from Philip Brown – Well explained sections showing the build and addition to a fully working web app. (find a Laravel tutorial, click on it and rush to the bottom of the page to see the full Laravel lesson tree)
- Laravel.com – Always good to read the actual documentation
Laravel Basics
Creating a new project
Personally I use a GitBash command line because Git is auto installed & I get to use Unix commands too. I’ll move into the parent folder. On my development machine I have a c:\web\sites folder under which sits all my development domains. I use Apache with virtual name servers to point local domain names to those folders.
So for instance I have a folder called c:\web\sites\laraveldemos
In there I now want to create a new project called MyTestProject so I’ll move to that folder in my command line and type;
composer create-project laravel/laravel MyTestProject
That starts off a full installation of Laravel and once completed (after a few minutes) the new project will exist in the new folder c:\web\sites\laraveldemos\MyTestProject.
Adding extras to a Project
The Laravel framework utilises a modular building process so that if you need an extension you can simply use Composer to pull in that extension.
More to follow….
