Starting the application

Now that we have the blueprints for the application, let's roll up our sleeves and start writing some code.

Start by opening a new terminal window and launch Homestead:

$ homestead ssh

Navigate to the directory you have mapped to Homestead (by default this is ~/Code):

$ cd ~/Code

Then use Composer to create a new Laravel project, as follows:

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel furbook.com --prefer-dist
$ cd furbook.com

Once Composer finishes downloading Laravel and resolving its dependencies, you will have a directory structure identical to the one presented in the first chapter.

Setting the application namespace

Applications in Laravel are namespaced. By default, this is just App—Laravel's great, but it still can't guess the name of your application! To set it to something more appropriate, we can use the Artisan command:

$ php artisan app:name Furbook

This will update our application's namespace to be Furbook instead.