安装和运行Laravel

Question

I am extremely new and frustrated with working with a command line. I am currently trying to install laravel to use with my PHP application. I have installed composer and now I am trying to install laravel.

I have first tried to follow the instructions on the documentation for laravel in that I have:

• installed composer
• ran composer global require "laravel/installer"
• failed to run laravel new blog: -bash: laravel: command not found

Next I tried to follow a laracast video:

• installed composer
• ran composer global require "laravel/installer"
• opened vim ~/.bashrc and added export PATH="$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"
• failed to run laravel new blog: -bash: laravel: command not found

In addition to laravel still not being availiable, when I go back to the bashrc file, I get the following notice:

Found a swap file by the name "~/.bashrc.swp"
          owned by: Shawn   dated: Wed Jun 21 16:01:37 2017
         file name: ~Shawn/.bashrc
          modified: YES
         user name: Shawn   host name: Shawns-MBP.domain
        process ID: 39328
While opening file "/Users/Shawn/.bashrc"
             dated: Wed Jun 21 16:19:11 2017
      NEWER than swap file!

(1) Another program may be editing the same file.  If this is the case,
    be careful not to end up with two different instances of the same
    file when making changes.  Quit, or continue with caution.
(2) An edit session for this file crashed.
    If this is the case, use ":recover" or "vim -r /Users/Shawn/.bashrc"
    to recover the changes (see ":help recovery").
    If you did this already, delete the swap file "/Users/Shawn/.bashrc.swp"
    to avoid this message.

Again, I am extremely confused by this process and simply can not wrap my head around what is going wrong and why it works for other people but I can not seem to get laravel correctly installed.

Answer 1

Your system is unable to find the laravel command. Assuming you did not get any errors with the composer global require "laravel/installer" command, the installer didn't update your system's known paths (basically, it needs to know that laravel maps to ~/.composer/vendor/bin/laravel and right now, it doesn't).

The edit to ~/.bashrc is intended to fix that, but you need to either run source ~/.bashrc or log out and log back in for the change to your .bashrc to take effect.

The alternative way (and the way I personally prefer) is to do what @manian said in the comments and run composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog. This allows you to create Laravel projects without needing to install and use the Laravel installer.

As for your issue with the .swp file, that's the result of not exiting Vim properly. Vim creates swp files as a backup in case Vim crashes. When exited properly, it deletes these backup files. However, if you exit Vim improperly, it's unable to delete them. If your file has been successfully updated and saved, then you can simply delete it.