In this episode, we get our Inertia app up and running using Laravel and Vue. We'll look at the easiest way to get started, which is by using a starter kit rather than wiring everything together manually. We go with Laravel Breeze, since it's lightweight and gets us right into the Inertia-specific functionality we're here to learn.
We'll go step-by-step through creating a new Laravel project, installing Breeze, and setting it up with the Vue template (which uses Inertia under the hood). After installing our dependencies, we serve up the app using npm and, optionally, Laravel Valet, so we can poke around in the browser and confirm that everything is working and actually running on Inertia and Vue—no Blade templates in sight!
Next, we hook up the database, run the migrations, and see that user authentication and registration all work exactly as you’d expect, but now they're happening through Inertia. We take a quick tour of the app structure, exploring how routes, views, and pages are laid out in a typical Laravel + Inertia setup. You'll notice that instead of Blade templates for pages, we now have Vue components, all organized inside the resources/js/pages folder.
Finally, we take a peek at how everything ties together: Laravel routes still look the same, controllers work as normal, but our views are now Vue pages. We look at how Inertia resolves these and how the whole single page application setup gets mounted and managed with Vue.
We wrap up by saying we'll mostly stick to files we create ourselves in this course (rather than using Breeze's built-in components), so everything learned here will apply whether you use Breeze, Jetstream, or wire up Inertia from scratch. Now that we're set up and comfortable with the structure, we're ready to start building real stuff with Inertia in the next episodes!