Book Image

Laravel 5.x Cookbook

By : Terry Matula, Alfred Nutile
Book Image

Laravel 5.x Cookbook

By: Terry Matula, Alfred Nutile

Overview of this book

Laravel is a prominent member of a new generation of web frameworks. It is one of the most popular PHP frameworks and is also free and an open source. Laravel 5 is a substantial upgrade with a lot of new toys, at the same time retaining the features that made Laravel wildly successful. It comes with plenty of architectural as well as design-based changes. The book is a blend of numerous recipes that will give you all the necessary tips you need to build an application. It starts with basic installation and configuration tasks and will get you up-and-running in no time. You will learn to create and customize your PHP app and tweak and re-design your existing apps for better performance. You will learn to implement practical recipes to utilize Laravel’s modular structure, the latest method injection, route caching, and interfacing techniques to create responsive modern-day PHP apps that stand on their own against other apps. Efficient testing and deploying techniques will make you more confident with your Laravel skills as you move ahead with this book. Towards the end of the book, you will understand a number of add-ons and new features essential to finalize your application to make it ready for subscriptions. You will be empowered to get your application out to the world.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Laravel 5.x Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up Gulp and Elixir


Elixir is new in Laravel 5.x and is a wrapper around Gulp, which is a well-known JavaScript build system. We will use it to manage assets later on in the book. For now, we just want to get it installed.

How to do it...

  1. SSH into Homestead:

    >homestead ssh
    >cd ~/Code/recipes
  2. Install Gulp using the following:

    >npm install
  3. When it is done, try the following:

    > node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp.js -v

How it works...

Once again, Homestead is making our work easier; NPM is already installed! So, we can use this to not only install Gulp but also other JavaScript libraries that we need. How to do this? If you look into the Laravel application that we downloaded, you will now see the =package.json file:

This is the file that NPM uses, just as PHP uses composer.json, to know what to install. Here, it is getting Elixir, Gulp, and Sass for us. Elixir is new in Laravel 5.x and is a wrapper around Gulp, which is a well-known JavaScript build system.

Notice too that if you type which gulp, it is installed globally, thanks to Homestead again!

Elixir will come in later, but for now, note gulpfile.js that is right above the package.json file; this is where we will set up our asset workflow later on.