/week-3-notes

Week 3 Notes

This week we are going to be building our first full application! In Week 1 we learned about routing and request types, in Week 2 we learned about creating HTML pages. We are now going to build our own servers and deploy websites locally! This is one of the most exciting lessons to build.

Laravel

We are going to be using something called a "framework" to deploy our own applications. Laravel is a framework written in the programming language of PHP. It's a full stack framework, which means it encompasses both the front-end (HTML, what you see) and the back-end (PHP, how it works). Don't worry if you don't know PHP - everything we are learning is going to be language and framework agnostic, meaning you can easily pick up any other framework.

Laravel is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, meaning it revolves around the idea of using these components to share information. We'll get into exactly what this means at a later time. For now, let's get things set up!

Deploying Laravel on Mac

Installing Homebrew

To get started, you need to install Homebrew on your Mac. Homebrew is a package management system for your computer. You can download it from their website here, or run this command in your terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Installer PHP in Homebrew

Now run this command:

brew install php

This will install PHP on your local machine through Homebrew. You can run brew services list to see all of the installed Homebrew packages.

Installing Composer

Composer is a PHP package manager. To install it you will need to follow the instructions here. Or run these commands:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '48e3236262b34d30969dca3c37281b3b4bbe3221bda826ac6a9a62d6444cdb0dcd0615698a5cbe587c3f0fe57a54d8f5') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

Now run, this will make it available globally:

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

To check that things are working, type composer in your terminal in any directory:

composer

Laravel Installer

Run this command to install the Laravel Installer:

composer global require laravel/installer

Now install Valet (this will boot a local server):

composer global require laravel/valet

Now install it:

valet install

To check that Valet is installed, run: ping foobar.test. You should see a list of web responses like this:

valet-test

Installing First Laravel Project

Now we will install our first project. To do this, we want to create a new directory within your Home Directory that is called Code. Inside the Code folder we will have all of our Laravel Projects. Now run:

laravel new blog

And you can now access this site by going to: http://blog.test in your web browser.

Note: "laravel not found" "valet not found" errors:

Run this command to make sure you don't get the dreaded valet install not found error:

echo "export PATH=$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile

Deploying Laravel on Windows

See this tutorial: https://medium.com/@eaimanshoshi/i-am-going-to-write-down-step-by-step-procedure-to-setup-homestead-for-laravel-5-2-17491a423aa