Install Laravel 5.4 on Windows fast using Laragon ✔

If you’ve been working with Laravel but are a Windows user, you’ve probably had a few headaches. Homestead, the officially supported Vagrant box doesn’t play nice with Windows, and Valet isn’t even available. I found a nice alternative to both. Laragon.

Now, to be clear, Laragon has nothing to do with Laravel – I don’t think. “Lara” followed by anything just sounds good… seriously let’s try it now:

Lara-cat, Lara-rhyno, Lara-potimus, Lara-dip, Lara-crap, Lara-stache, Lara-bat, Lara-man, Lara-done… See?

OK so Laragon is much like XAMPP or WAMPP if you’ve used those, only it’s a little more convenient and relevant for modern development. Here’s how we use it to install Laravel 5.4.

First, install Laragon

Get the download from this page: https://laragon.org/download.html

Click either “Full + Nginx” or “Full + Apache” – whatever your preference. If you don’t have a preference, choose Nginx. It’s the server used on Laravel’s Homestead.

Once the download finishes just run the installer, and keep all the default settings.

Laragon should open automatically, and you’ll see a window like this:

Cool beans!

Running the quick create tool

Now you just do this:

1. click “Start All”
2. right-click anywhere on the window
3. click on “quick create”
4. select and click on “Laravel”
5. type the name of your project
6. click “OK”

Couldn’t fit this into one GIF…

Once you follow those steps, a command line interface should pop up. It’ll look like this:

Just twiddle your thumbs for a second, or if you have fixed wireless internet like I do then maybe grab a coffee and stretch your legs 😉

When the install is finished you’ll see some output as such:

Now you can visit the name of your project followed with .dev in your browser. If you named your project “test” visit “test.dev”.

And you’ll now have a running Laravel app like so…

To open this project in your editor, navigate to C:\laragon\www\test

And that is it. You’re set up with a pretty URL and a fresh Laravel install hot off the press… and Laragon made it a cinch!

Summary

I’ve been using Laragon for about 3 months now and have been more than happy with it. This post showed off how easy it is to get up and running with Laravel through the GUI, but truthfully I usually just run cd /c/laragon/www && composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel name-of-project – yeah that’s right, I don’t use the Laravel installer – so what?

I’m just faster in the command line and I of course have aliases set up to make that a little easier to type. The nice thing, is that there is nothing to configure to generate your pretty URL. Laragon will automatically write the relation in your etc/hosts file. You just have to remember to reload the server if you created your project through the command line.

I may cover some other neat tricks with Laragon in a later post, but for now…

Cheers,

Dan

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