In this episode, we kick things off by setting up a fresh Laravel project with no starter kit—so it's truly from scratch. First, we install Tailwind CSS to give our app some simple styling (it's optional, but it's nice to have!).
From there, we bring in Laravel Folio, which lets us handle routing without needing to mess with the traditional web routes—super handy for page-based setups. We create an app layout component to use as our main wrapper, and start building out our folder structure with Folio's pages directory. Once Folio is good to go, we set up Tailwind's config and hook up our CSS so we can start styling our pages right away.
Next up, we bring in Livewire. With that in place, we install Volt—the star of the show for this series. We keep things simple by building a basic Volt component: a counter that you can increment by clicking a button (classic demo, but effective!). We walk through the slightly different, function-first syntax that Volt brings to Livewire, and show how to tie the state and rendering together all in a single file.
By the end of this episode, you’ve got a solid Laravel setup with Tailwind, Folio, Livewire, and Volt all playing nicely together, and a working demo component to prove it! This sets us up perfectly for building out more advanced features in upcoming episodes.