In this episode, we're kicking things off by setting up a fresh Laravel project. Whether you're brand new to Laravel or just need a quick refresher, we'll walk through everything step-by-step.
We start by using the Laravel Installer to spin up a new project, cleverly named "Laravel Subscriptions." To save us some time down the road, we're pulling in the Breeze starter kit for authentication (so we don't have to build login and registration from scratch). We pick Blade with Alpine as our stack, skip the extra complexity of Livewire or Inertia for now, and opt for Pest as our testing framework. Quick note: we're not initializing a Git repo just yet, but you can do that if you want!
Next up, we set up our database connection (using MySQL, but you can choose what you're comfortable with), then run the default migrations to lay down all the core tables we need. Once that's out of the way, we open up our project in our code editor and double-check the database to make sure everything looks good.
For serving our app locally, we're using Laravel Herd, which gives us a nice, easy test domain (like laravel-subscriptions.test
). Herd also makes it simple to share our local domain with outside services—super handy for when we set up webhooks with Stripe later!
Finally, we register a user account to confirm that everything is working as expected and you're able to log in and manage your profile. That's pretty much it for the initial setup. In the next episode, we'll dive into customizing Breeze and making it fit our subscription app needs.