In this episode, we start things off by setting up a brand new Laravel project, which we’ll use as the foundation for our app. We use the official Laravel installer, so you get to see exactly how a fresh Laravel app gets created (in this case, it’s called "Pay for Access").
We jump right into configuring our environment – changing up the .env file to point to our database (Postgres in my case, but you can stick to MySQL if you prefer). Don’t forget to create the actual database!
With our environment ready, we run a quick php artisan migrate to get our default tables set up, including the users table.
Next, we pull in Laravel Breeze, which gives us a clean starting point for authentication (think: login, register). You’ll see how simple it is to add with Composer, and we take a peek at the generated controllers (you usually won’t need to touch these until you want to customize auth).
After installing Breeze, we handle the front end: running npm install and npm run dev to pull down and bundle all required assets. This includes Tailwind CSS for styling and Alpine.js for snappy interactivity — we highlight Alpine since we’ll use it to power our checkout in future episodes.
To wrap up, we fire up the local dev server and confirm everything’s working by registering a test user and landing on the dashboard. Things are looking good!
In the next part, we’ll tackle creating the members area and protecting it so only logged-in users can access it.