In this episode, we're getting our development environment ready to start building with Laravel, Inertia.js using Vue, and Pest for testing. We walk through the process of spinning up a new Laravel project (using the latest version at the time with the --dev flag), and setting it up with Breeze so we can scaffold out the basics quickly.

You'll see how to select Inertia with Vue when setting up Breeze, pick MySQL as your main database, and get everything installed. Once everything is ready, we run the migrations and make sure our database is ready to go.

Next up, we quickly boot the app to ensure everything works in the browser—though we won't use login or registration since the project is going to be open to the public. If you wanted users to be able to make bookings while logged in, we point out that's an option you'll see later.

After that's sorted, we hop into configuring our testing setup. We'll adjust PHPUnit to run tests against an SQLite database so we don't mess with our development data, and give Pest a quick run to check that the default tests are passing. To keep things neat, we clear out the example and auth tests so it's easier to see what we're working with in later episodes.

By the end of this video, you'll have a fresh Laravel + Inertia project up and running with a clean slate for tests—ready to start building the core booking system features (which is what's coming next!).