Introduction to Laravel

Laravel is a renowned PHP web application framework known for its expressive and elegant syntax. It provides a structured foundation for developers, allowing them to focus on building incredible applications without getting bogged down in the minutiae. Laravel aims to deliver an exceptional developer experience, boasting powerful features like dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues, scheduled jobs, and comprehensive testing capabilities.

Whether you’re a newcomer to PHP web frameworks or a seasoned developer, Laravel is versatile enough to cater to all levels of expertise. It’s designed to evolve with you, assisting beginners in taking their first steps in web development and providing advanced developers with the tools they need to elevate their skills even further.

Why Choose Laravel?

There are numerous tools and frameworks available for web application development, but Laravel stands out for several reasons:

• Progressive Framework: Laravel is termed a “progressive” framework, meaning it grows with the developer. It offers a vast library of documentation, guides, and tutorials for beginners, ensuring they aren’t overwhelmed. For senior developers, Laravel provides robust tools for dependency injection, unit testing, queues, real-time events, and more.
• Scalability: Laravel is highly scalable. With the inherent scalability of PHP and Laravel’s built-in support for fast, distributed cache systems like Redis, scaling horizontally becomes straightforward. Laravel applications can easily handle hundreds of millions of requests per month. For those seeking extreme scaling, platforms like Laravel Vapor allow applications to scale almost limitlessly using AWS’s serverless technology.
• Community Support: Laravel amalgamates the best packages from the PHP ecosystem, resulting in a robust and developer-friendly framework. Thousands of talented developers worldwide have contributed to Laravel, fostering a vibrant and supportive community.

Installation and Setup

Before embarking on your first Laravel project, ensure you have PHP and Composer installed on your local machine. Once these prerequisites are met, you can create a new Laravel project using the Composer create-project command. Alternatively, you can globally install the Laravel installer via Composer for even more convenience.

For those who prefer Docker, Laravel offers Sail, a built-in solution for running Laravel projects using Docker. This means developers don’t have to worry about setting up complex development tools like web servers and databases on their local machines. Instead, they can focus solely on their application.

Getting Started with Laravel on Ubuntu

For developers using Ubuntu, the process is straightforward. Ensure Docker Compose is installed, and then use a terminal command to create a new Laravel project. Once the project is set up, navigate to the application directory and start Laravel Sail, which provides an interface for Laravel’s default Docker configuration. After initializing the Docker containers, the application will be accessible via a web browser at http://localhost.

Conclusion

Laravel is a comprehensive PHP framework that prioritizes developer experience, offering a plethora of features that streamline the web development process. Its scalability, community support, and extensive documentation make it an excellent choice for both beginners and experienced d

Latest Version: As per the documentation, the latest version of Laravel at the time of this search is 10.x.

Installation on Ubuntu: For a detailed guide on installing Laravel site-wide on Ubuntu servers, it’s recommended to refer to the official Laravel documentation or other trusted sources that provide step-by-step instructions tailored for Ubuntu.