In this episode, we kick things off by setting up a brand new Laravel project. If you're a Laravel beginner, don't worry—I'll walk you through every step so you can follow along easily!
We start by creating a fresh Laravel app and select Laravel Breeze as our starter kit. This gives us a ready-to-go registration and login system right out of the box (but don’t sweat it if you’re not using Breeze, everything here still applies). For simplicity, we stick with the Blade and Alpine setup and pick MySQL as our database.
Once the app is set up, we take a peek in the browser to check that things look good, and sure enough, registration and login work. We then pop into the .env file to double-check the database settings, then run our migrations to create the default tables (like users) in the database. If your database doesn’t exist, Laravel will prompt you as you go.
At this point, we’ve got a working login system, but we’ll be tweaking things soon—particularly the user table to store social account IDs (like GitHub or X ID) later on. For now though, we leave the normal login/registration in place as an extra option.
That’s the basic setup sorted! Next up, we’ll get into the essentials of Laravel Socialite, including installing it and getting ready to let users authenticate with their favorite social services.