I’ve really been digging Laravel lately. Especially due to the wonderful documentation and amazing resources provided by Laracasts. Below are some notes on getting going on a local Ubuntu install. I am running Ubuntu 16.10 and these notes assume a fresh install.

Install PHP 7.0 and additional dependencies

sudo apt install php7.0 php7.0-zip php7.0-mbstring phpunit

Install Composer (Globally)

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Install the Laravel CLI (Globally)

composer global require "laravel/installer"

Add globally installed composer commands to the PATH

Add the following to the end of your ~/.bashrc file

# Add Composer to the PATH
export PATH=$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin:$PATH

You can either source the ~/.bashrc file or open a new terminal window.

Verify everything works

You can do this by running laravel new test_project. Then go to the directory where the new test_project is created with cd test_project. Once you are in the new project directory install all local dependencies with composer install and then run it with php artisan serve. I ran into an issue right away that had to do with the APP_KEY. The error manifested itself as:

The only supported ciphers are AES-128-CBC and AES-256-CBC with the correct key lengths.

A great explanation is shown here but the steps to get a fully functional base install going are:

# Copy the .env.example file to .env
cp .env.example .env

# Generate App Key
php artisan key:generate

Now if you run php artisan serve you will see a fully running Laravel app. Happy Hacking!