In this episode, we kick things off by setting up a brand new Laravel project. We talk through the initial choices you have—like whether to use a starter kit (such as Breeze, if you need built-in authentication) or just go with a totally clean Laravel install. For this course, we're going with the plain install and adding Livewire manually later.

We use the Laravel installer to spin up a new project called laravel-booking-system-livewire, skipping any starter kits for now. When prompted, we select the PEST testing framework, and opt not to initialize a Git repository (though you can if you want!).

Once the install finishes, we configure the database, choosing MySQL, and let the installer run all the default migrations for us. If anything needs tweaking, like database credentials, we take a quick look at how you can edit your .env file to make adjustments. After confirming that everything's set up and the migrations have been applied, we're ready for development!

Next up, we'll install Livewire and start putting together the base layout for our app. Stay tuned!