# Installation

By

Charl Cronje

First, download the Laravel installer using Composer.

composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"

Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin directory in your PATH (or C:\%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin if working with Windows) so the laravel executable is found when you run the laravel command in your terminal.

Once installed, the simple laravel new command will create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For instance, laravel new blog would create a directory named blog containing a fresh Laravel installation with all dependencies installed. This method of installation is much faster than installing via Composer.

The Laravel framework utilizes Composer for installation and dependency management. If you haven't already, start by installing Composer.

Now you can install Laravel by issuing the following command from your terminal:

composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name 4.2.*

This command will download and install a fresh copy of Laravel in a new your-project-name folder within your current directory.

If you prefer, you can alternatively download a copy of the Laravel repository from GitHub manually. Next run the composer install command in the root of your manually created project directory. This command will download and install the framework's dependencies.