How to Install Laravel 5 Framework on Ubuntu

By Praful Kumar

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Introduction

Laravel is an Open Source PHP framework designed for the fast development of MVC Web applications in PHP. This article will help you to install Laravel 5 PHP framework on Ubuntu operating systems.

Installing Composer

I assume PHP, Apache and MySQL are already installed on your environment.

First you need to install Composer PHP tool. Composer is required for installing Laravel dependencies.

Use the commands below to download and use Composer command in your system.

1. Just execute the below command to install Composer:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

2. Move Composer to bin folder:

$ sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

3. Set file execution permission

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Installing Laravel

4. Now install Laravel: To download latest version of Laravel, Use below command to clone master repo of laravel from github.

$ cd /var/www/html/
$ git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git

Navigate to Laravel code directory and use composer to install all dependencies required for Laravel framework.

$ cd /var/www/html/laravel
$ sudo composer install

Dependencies installation will take some time. After than set file permissions.

$ chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/laravel
$ chmod -R 755 /var/www/laravel
$ chmod -R 777 /var/www/laravel/app/storage

5. Generate and set Encryption Key: Now set the 32 bit long random number encryption key, which used by the Illuminate encrypter service.

$ php artisan key:generate
Application key [yOHTFu3Bc1Kr7Ykqed4Gt6nmW3S0ZC917=] set successfully.

6. Now edit config/app.php configuration file and update above generated application key as followings. Also make sure cipher is set properly.

'key' => env('APP_KEY', 'yOHTFu3Bc1Kr7Ykqed4Gt6nmW3S0ZC917'),
'cipher' => 'AES-256-CBC',

Configuring Apache

7. Create Apache VirtualHost: Now add a Virtual Host in your Apache configuration file to access Laravel framework from web browser. Create Apache configuration file under /etc/apache2/port.conf (may be different for other OS) directory and add below content.

$ vim /etc/apache2/ports.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName laravel.prafulkr.in
    ServerAlias laravel.prafulkr.in
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/laravel/public/
    <Directory /var/www/html/laravel/public/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride all
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        FileETag MTime Size
        SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
        BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog /var/www/logs/systempk.log
</VirtualHost>

Starting the Application

8. Restart apache server:

$ sudo service apache2 reload

Now open the Web server page in browser and let's start building an awesome application using Laravel 5 PHP Framework.