Install Laravel

Posted under » Laravel on 20 May 2026

Who cares what I write here if you can read the official Laravel 13.9 installation instructions? It is a long read so I like to keep it short. Before installing, you need to meet the minimum requirements ie. PHP 8, composer and MySQL should already be installed.

composer global require laravel/installer

You're ready to create a new Laravel application.

laravel new mylaraapp

You put your MySQL config on the .env and that's it? Not quite. Laravel is not just PHP but you also need Javascript. You should install Node JS and NPM so that you can compile your application's frontend assets like css etc.

apt install nodejs
apt install npm

Laravel uses Vite. So you need to install npm on your 'mylaraapp'. Otherwise you will have a 'Vite Manifest Not Found'. Vite will help you install CSS frameworks like Tailwind `easier'.

npm install
npm install tailwindcss @tailwindcss/vite

So if you are missing things like css, to `build' the assets you

npm run build

This will run vite and stuff. If you want to run laravel on dev mode, without apache or http://localhost:5173/

npm run dev