In this episode, we're setting the stage for all the cool Livewire stuff we’ll be building! We start from scratch by spinning up a brand new Laravel project. Next, we add Laravel Breeze, which gives us all the basic authentication and templates we'll need – super handy so we don’t have to waste time building this from the ground up.
Once that's done, we sort out our database connection (switching over to Postgres in this demo), run our migrations, and make sure our environment is good to go. Then, we install Livewire itself, pull in its assets, and test things out by dropping a quick "hello" component on the dashboard to make sure everything’s wired up properly.
But we’re not done yet! To help us dig into performance and understand what’s happening under the hood with Livewire, we install Laravel Debugbar. We take a quick look at what Debugbar tracks for us, like queries, memory usage, view renders, and even Livewire-specific info like which data and components are being used. This is going to be super helpful for diagnosing and improving the performance of our app as we go.
Now our app is all set up, and we’re ready to dive into building and profiling Livewire components in the next episodes. Let’s go!