Laravel Application Development Cookbook

To get started, we should have our development server running as well as have git installed. In the server's web directory, create a myapp directory to hold our files. Installation will all be done in the command line.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

For many, simply running git clone would be enough to get their project going. However, since we want to have our framework act as a submodule, we need to separate those files from our project.

First, we download the files from GitHub, and since we don't need any of the framework files, we can delete everything but our public folder. Then, we create our submodule in the framework directory and download everything there. When that's complete, we run composer install to get all our vendor packages installed.

To get the framework connected to our application, we modify /laravel/public/index.php and change the require paths to our framework directory. That will let our application know exactly where the framework files are located.

One alternative solution is to move the public directory to our server's root. Then, while updating our index.php file, we'll use __DIR__ . '/../framework/laravel/bootstrap' to include everything correctly.

This recipe requires a recent version of WAMP server, available at http://wampserver.com, though the basic principle applies to any Apache configuration on Windows.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

First, in the Apache config file httpd.conf, we uncomment the line to allow the file to include the vhosts configuration files. You can include the code directly in the httpd.conf file, but this method keeps things more organized.

In the httpd-vhosts.conf file, we add our VirtualHost code. DocumentRoot tells the server where the files are located and ServerName is the base URL that the server will look for. Since we only want to use this for our local development, we make sure to only allow access to the localhost with the IP 127.0.0.1.

In the hosts file, we need to tell Windows which IP to use for the myapp.dev URL. After restarting Apache and our browser, we should be able to go to http://myapp.dev and view our application.

While this recipe is specific to Windows and WAMP, the same idea can be applied to most Apache installations. The only difference will be the location of the httpd.conf file (in Linux Ubuntu, it's in /etc/apache2) and the path to the public directory for DocumentRoot (in Ubuntu, it might be something like /var/www/myapp/public). The hosts file for Linux and Mac OS X will be located in /etc/hosts.

For this recipe, we just need a fresh installation of Laravel and everything running on a properly configured Apache server.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

This simple bit of code will take anything we add in the URL and direct it to the public directory. That way, we don't need to manually type in /public.

If we decide to move this application to a production environment, this is not the best way to accomplish the task. In that case, we would just move our files outside the web root and make /public our root directory.

For this recipe, we need a regular installation of Laravel.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

Most of the configuration will happen in the /app/config/app.php file. While setting the URL isn't required, and Laravel does a great job figuring it out without setting it, it's always good to remove any work from the framework that we can. Next, we set our location. If we choose to provide localization in our app, this setting will be our default. Then, we set our application key, since it's best to not keep the default.

Next, we set which database driver we'll be using. Laravel comes with four drivers out of the box: mysql, sqlite, sqlsrv (MS SQL Server), and pgsql (Postgres).

Finally, our app/storage directory will be used for keeping any temporary data, such as sessions or cache, if we choose. To allow this, we need to make sure the app can write to the directory.

For an easy way to create a secure application key, remove the default key and leave it empty. Then, in your command line, navigate to your application root directory and type:

php artisan key:generate

That will create a unique and secure key and automatically save it in your configuration file.

Sublime Text 2 is a popular code editor that is very extensible and makes writing code effortless. An evaluation version can be downloaded from http://www.sublimetext.com/2.

We also need to have the Package Control package installed and enabled in Sublime, and that can be found at http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control/installation.

For this recipe, follow these steps:

The Laravel snippets in Sublime Text 2 greatly simplify writing common code, and it includes pretty much everything we'll need for application development. For example, when creating a route, simply start typing Route and a list will pop up allowing us to choose which route we want, which then automatically completes the rest of the code we need.

Installing the Laravel-Blade package is helpful if we use the Blade template system that comes with Laravel. It recognizes Blade code in the files and will automatically highlight the syntax.

For this recipe, we'll be adding namespaces to the NetBeans IDE, but the process will be similar with others.

Follow these steps to complete this recipe:

Some IDEs need help understanding the syntax of a framework. To get NetBeans to understand, we download a list of all the Laravel classes and options. Then, when we add it to the Include Path, NetBeans will automatically check the file and show us the autocomplete options.

We can have the documents downloaded and updated automatically using Composer. For installation instructions, visit https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper.

For this recipe, we need to set up a standard Laravel installation.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

Most of the time, we will use Composer to add packages and libraries to our app. However, there may be libraries that aren't available through Composer or custom libraries that we want to keep separate. To accomplish this, we need to dedicate a spot to hold our class libraries; in this case, we create a directory named custom and put it in our app directory.

Then we add our class files, making sure the class names and filenames are the same. This could either be classes we create ourselves or maybe even a legacy class that we need to use.

Finally, we add the directory to Laravel's ClassLoader. When that's complete, we'll be able to use those classes anywhere in our application.

For this recipe, we need to set up a standard Laravel installation.

To complete this recipe, follow these steps:

Namespaces are a powerful addition to PHP, and they allow our classes to be used without us having to worry about their class names interfering with other class names. By autoloading namespaces in Laravel, we could create a complex group of classes and never have to worry about class names conflicting with other namespaces.

For our purposes, we're loading the custom class through composer, and the PSR-0 standard of autoloading.

To further extend the use of our namespaced class, we could use the IoC to bind it to our app. More information can be found in the Laravel documentation at http://laravel.com/docs/ioc.