Laravel 5.3 Quickstart

This repository aims to give a simple but quick start to prototyping a new application with Laravel. It currently uses Laravel 5.3.

Getting Started

• I use Valet. This means zero setup, and the site is ready to go immediately at http://[project].dev

• To set up the project, run ./setup.sh, which will carry out the following tasks:

• Create a SQLite database: touch database/database.sqlite

• Copy the .env file: cp .env.example .env

• Run composer install (or php composer install, composer.phar install etc, depending on your setup)

• Run php artisan migrate to set up the database.

• Run php artisan key:generate to create an application key.

• Run npm install then gulp to set up node modules and process CSS, JS, and copy files to /public folder.

Database

• A SQLite database for getting up and running without fuss.
• Uncomment database settings in .env to switch to your MySQL database if required.

Authentication

• User authentication scaffolding is already set up.
• Social login via oAuth and Laravel Socialite. Google, Facebook and Strava ready to go, just add credentials to .env file (or config/services.php). More available.

CSS and Javascript

• Run gulp watch to keep watching the resources folder for changes to the SASS and JS files.
• Bootstrap SASS is installed via npm (in packages.json file), and is processed by Gulp/Elixir.
• All styling should be done in the resources/assets/sass/app.scss and resources/assets/sass/_variables.scss files.

Email

• Credentials must be added to .env or to config/mail.php so that password resets work.

Development tools (require-dev only)

• Adminer database tool accessible through navbar link (/adminer). Logs in automatically to the active database when opened.
• API testing tool through navbar link (/api-tester).
• Tracy debugging tool.
• Log Viewer
• A page showing many useful components from the Bootstrap 3 framework at /kitchen-sink.

More Laravel tools

Lists of useful Laravel packages are found here and here.