In this episode, we're prepping everything to get our example application running on your local machine. We'll walk through how to clone down the repo, install all the Composer and npm dependencies, and set up the database—good news, it's SQLite, so setup is straightforward. We create the database.sqlite
file, run our migrations, then build the assets with npm run dev
.
After that, you'll learn how to start up Laravel Reverb locally (just using the debug setting at this point), so you can check if real-time features are working. The .env
file is already included in the repo for convenience (normally you wouldn’t deploy it, but it makes things easier for now).
Next, we demonstrate how registering an account and clicking the special dashboard button triggers a real-time event, so you know everything is running as expected. We also briefly look at the simplest Alpine.js setup and the backend broadcasting route to get a feel for how new messages are sent and displayed live.
This episode gets you all set up locally, so that in the next part, we can move on and actually deploy the app. Already have an app deployed? Feel free to skip ahead to the Forge configuration steps!