Installing a New Laravel Project

Creating a new Laravel project can go through Composer directly or the dedicated Laravel installer tool — both ultimately produce the exact same project structure, with the installer simply adding a friendlier interactive setup wizard on top.

Prerequisites

php -v      # PHP 8.2+ for recent Laravel versions
composer -v

Creating a project via Composer directly

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app

This is the most universally available method, needing nothing beyond Composer itself already installed — it downloads the latest stable Laravel release and its dependencies directly into a new my-app directory.

Installing and using the Laravel installer tool

composer global require laravel/installer

laravel new my-app

The installer tool adds an interactive setup wizard — prompting for a starter kit choice (Breeze, Jetstream, or none), a testing framework preference, and database configuration — none of which composer create-project alone provides; it's a convenience layer on top, not a functionally different underlying project.

Creating a project at a specific Laravel version

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app "10.*"

Pinning a specific major version is worth doing when a project needs to match an existing team's Laravel version, or when working through documentation or a tutorial written specifically for an older release rather than the current latest one.

Running the development server

cd my-app
php artisan serve

This starts a simple built-in PHP development server (by default at http://127.0.0.1:8000) — genuinely fine for local development, but never intended for production use, which needs a real web server like Apache or Nginx as covered elsewhere on this site.

Setting up the environment file

cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

composer create-project and the laravel new installer both handle these two steps automatically as part of project creation — worth knowing manually in case a project is ever cloned from an existing Git repository instead, where .env is deliberately excluded from version control and needs to be set up by hand.

The generated default project structure

my-app/
  app/
  bootstrap/
  config/
  database/
  public/
  resources/
  routes/
  storage/
  .env
  composer.json

Verifying the installation succeeded

php artisan --version

Following the version-checking pattern covered elsewhere on this site, this confirms both that the installation genuinely succeeded and exactly which Laravel version was actually installed, in case a version range in composer.json resolved to something other than what was expected.