Installation | Laravel 13.x - The clean stack for Artisans and agents

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. A web framework provides a structure and starting point for creating your application, allowing you to focus on creating something amazing while we sweat the details.
Laravel strives to provide an amazing developer experience while providing powerful features such as thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing, and more.
Whether you are new to PHP web frameworks or have years of experience, Laravel is a framework that can grow with you. We'll help you take your first steps as a web developer or give you a boost as you take your expertise to the next level. We can't wait to see what you build.
There are a variety of tools and frameworks available to you when building a web application. However, we believe Laravel is the best choice for building modern, full-stack web applications.
We like to call Laravel a "progressive" framework. By that, we mean that Laravel grows with you. If you're just taking your first steps into web development, Laravel's vast library of documentation, guides, and video tutorials will help you learn the ropes without becoming overwhelmed.
If you're a senior developer, Laravel gives you robust tools for dependency injection, unit testing, queues, real-time events, and more. Laravel is fine-tuned for building professional web applications and ready to handle enterprise workloads.
Laravel is incredibly scalable. Thanks to the scaling-friendly nature of PHP and Laravel's built-in support for fast, distributed cache systems like Redis, horizontal scaling with Laravel is a breeze. In fact, Laravel applications have been easily scaled to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.
Need extreme scaling? Platforms like Laravel Cloud allow you to run your Laravel application at nearly limitless scale.
Laravel's opinionated conventions and well-defined structure make it an ideal framework for AI assisted development using tools like Cursor and Claude Code. When you ask an AI agent to add a controller, it knows exactly where to place it. When you need a new migration, the naming conventions and file locations are predictable. This consistency eliminates the guesswork that often trips up AI tools in more flexible frameworks.
Beyond file organization, Laravel's expressive syntax and comprehensive documentation give AI agents the context they need to generate accurate, idiomatic code. Features like Eloquent relationships, form requests, and middleware follow patterns that agents can reliably understand and replicate. The result is AI-generated code that looks like it was written by a seasoned Laravel developer, not stitched together from generic PHP snippets.
To learn more about why Laravel is the perfect choice for AI assisted development, check out our documentation on agentic development.
Laravel combines the best packages in the PHP ecosystem to offer the most robust and developer friendly framework available. In addition, thousands of talented developers from around the world have contributed to the framework. Who knows, maybe you'll even become a Laravel contributor.
If you are using an AI coding agent like Claude Code or OpenCode, you can start with a prompt that gives the agent a Laravel-specific playbook before it touches your project.
The prompt below tells the agent where to find Laravel's installation guidance, what to prioritize, and how to make sensible defaults when you haven't made a choice yet. Paste this into your agent to get started:
After the agent reads the instructions, it should guide you step by step and keep the setup aligned with Laravel's defaults.
Before creating your first Laravel application, make sure that your local machine has PHP, Composer, and the Laravel installer installed. In addition, you should install either Node and NPM or Bun so that you can compile your application's frontend assets.
If you don't have PHP and Composer installed on your local machine, the following commands will install PHP, Composer, and the Laravel installer on macOS, Windows, or Linux:
After running one of the commands above, you should restart your terminal session. To update PHP, Composer, and the Laravel installer after installing them via php.new, you can re-run the command in your terminal.
If you already have PHP and Composer installed, you may install the Laravel installer via Composer:
For a fully-featured, graphical PHP installation and management experience, check out Laravel Herd.
After you have installed PHP, Composer, and the Laravel installer, you are ready to create a new Laravel application:
Once the application has been created, you can start Laravel's local development server, queue worker, and Vite development server using the dev Composer script:
Once you have started the development server, you can access your application in your web browser at http://localhost:8000. Next, you're ready to start taking your next steps into the Laravel ecosystem. Of course, you may also want to configure a database and run the necessary migrations.
If you would like a head start when developing your Laravel application, consider using one of our starter kits. Laravel's starter kits provide backend and frontend authentication scaffolding for your new Laravel application.
All configuration files for the Laravel framework are stored in the config directory. Each option is documented, so feel free to look through the files and get familiar with the options available to you.
Laravel needs almost no additional configuration out of the box. You are free to get started developing! However, you may wish to review the config/app.php file and its documentation. It contains several options such as url and locale that you may wish to change according to your application.
Since many of Laravel's configuration option values may vary depending on whether your application is running on your local machine or on a producti