How To Install Laravel 5 Framework on Ubuntu 16.04, 14.04 & LinuxMint

Laravel is an open source PHP framework, designed for the faster development of MVC web applications in PHP. This article will help you to install Laravel 5 PHP Framework on Ubuntu 15.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS, Debian and LinuxMint operating systems.

Step 1 – Install LAMP

To start with Laravel, we first need to set up a running LAMP server. If you have already running LAMP stack skip this step else use followings commands to set up lamp on Ubuntu system.

Install PHP 5.6

$ sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install -y php5.6 php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-gd

Install Apache2

$ apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5

Install MySQL

$ apt-get install mysql-server php5.6-mysql

Step 2 – Install Composer

Composer is required for installing Laravel dependencies. So use below commands to download and use as a command in our system.

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

Step 3 – Install Laravel

To download latest version of Laravel, Use below command to clone master repo of laravel from github.

$ cd /var/www
$ git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git

Navigate to Laravel code directory and use composer to install all dependencies required for Laravel framework.

$ cd /var/www/laravel
$ sudo composer install

Dependencies installation will take some time. After than set proper permissions on files.

$ chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/laravel
$ chmod -R 755 /var/www/laravel
$ chmod -R 777 /var/www/laravel/app/storage

Step 4 – Set Encryption Key

Now set the 32 bit long random number encryption key, which used by the Illuminate encrypter service.

$ php artisan key:generate

Application key [uOHTNu3Au1Kt7Uloyr2Py9blU0J5XQ75] set successfully.

Now edit config/app.php configuration file and update above generated application key as followings. Also make sure cipher is set properly.

'key' => env('APP_KEY', 'uOHTNu3Au1Kt7Uloyr2Py9blU0J5XQ75'),

'cipher' => 'AES-256-CBC',

Step 5 – Create Apache VirtualHost

Now add a Virtual Host in your Apache configuration file to access Laravel framework from web browser. Create Apache configuration file under /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory and add below content.

$ vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.example.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>

        ServerName laravel.example.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/laravel/public

        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride None
        </Directory>
        <Directory /var/www/laravel>
                AllowOverride All
        </Directory>

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        LogLevel warn
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Finally lets enable website and reload Apache service using below command.

$ a2ensite laravel.example.com
$ sudo service apache2 reload

Step 6 – Access Laravel

At this point you have successfully completed Laravel 5 PHP framework on your system. Now make host file entry to access your Laravel application in web browser. Change 127.0.0.1 with your server ip and laravel.example.com with your domain name configured in Apache.

$ sudo echo "127.0.0.1  laravel.example.com" >> /etc/hosts

And access http://laravel.example.com in your favorite web browser as below.

Let’s start building an awesome application using Laravel 5 PHP Framework. Thanks.