In this episode, we kick things off by setting up a brand new Laravel project, just so we're all on the same page. If you're totally new to Laravel or just want that "fresh project" smell, this is your starting point. We use the Inertia starter kit, but don’t stress—while it uses Vue and Inertia, all the Vue parts will work wherever you want, so don’t let that throw you off!
The walkthrough guides you through running the commands to create the Laravel app with Breeze and Vue enabled. We’ll use MySQL as our database (but honestly, any database Laravel supports would work here) and then run migrations to get everything set up.
Once the app is installed, we set up some fake data to play with. Laravel comes ready with a users table and a factory, so we quickly seed a thousand users. To make things more interesting, we also add another model—courses—along with a migration and a factory so we can seed a thousand courses as well. It's all about having enough data sources to test with later!
Instead of building out seeders, we use php artisan tinker for a fast way to bulk-create data right from the command line. Now, if you pop into your database, you’ll see plenty of users and courses ready to go.
The episode wraps with a quick look at the dashboard in the new app, where we’ll eventually be adding our search component. You’ll see where the search will fit in, but of course, you can use it anywhere in your own app—put it on a dashboard, a public page, or wherever makes sense.
By the end, you should have a fresh Laravel app with Vue ready to go and a big set of sample data for testing out search and index features in upcoming episodes.