In this episode, we kick things off by setting up a fresh Laravel project called friends using the Laravel installer. After creating the project, we jump right into installing Laravel Breeze — it's a simple starter kit that gives us everything we need for authentication and a basic frontend, perfect for getting going quickly.

We walk through running the necessary composer and artisan commands, taking care to cd into our project directory when needed. Next up, we install our JavaScript dependencies with npm install, compile the assets with npm run dev, and then sort out our database connection by tweaking the .env file (in this case hooking Postgres up, though you can use MySQL too).

After that, we run our database migrations—after correcting a minor typo in the database name!—and get all the standard Laravel tables set up for us. We wrap things up by spinning up a local server with php artisan serve and testing the registration flow to make sure everything is working as it should. Finally, we open up our code editor and run npm run watch to keep our assets compiling while we work, keeping our terminal handy for future commands.

That's the quick project setup sorted! In the next episode, we'll start working on the friends page and continue building from there.