Chapter 2. Setting Up a Development Environment

Laravel is more than just a framework: a whole ecosystem and toolset has been developed around it to make building PHP applications faster and more enjoyable. These tools are entirely opt-in and the knowledge of them is not necessary to use and build projects in Laravel, but they do go hand-in-hand with the framework, so it's worth covering.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Meeting Composer, a dependency manager
• Introduction to Homestead, and using it to manage Laravel projects