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Laravel 4 Bootstrap Starter Site ProjectStatus

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Laravel 4 Bootstrap Starter Site is a sample application for beginning development with Laravel 4.

Features

Issues

See github issue list for current list.

Recommendations

I recommend that you use Grunt to compile and minify your assets. See this article for details.

Also I recommend using Former for your forms. It's an excellent library.

Requirements

PHP >= 5.4.0
MCrypt PHP Extension

Installation instructions for the mcrypt extension are available here.

How to install

Step 1: Get the code

Option 1: Git Clone

$ git clone git://github.com/andrewelkins/Laravel-4-Bootstrap-Starter-Site.git laravel

Option 2: Download the repository

https://github.com/andrewelkins/Laravel-4-Bootstrap-Starter-Site/archive/master.zip

Step 2: Use Composer to install dependencies

Option 1: Composer is not installed globally

$ cd laravel
$ curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ php composer.phar install

Option 2: Composer is installed globally

$ cd laravel
$ composer install

If you haven't already, you might want to make composer be installed globally for future ease of use.

Some packages used to preprocess and minify assests are required on the development environment.

When you deploy your project on a production environment you will want to upload the composer.lock file used on the development environment and only run php composer.phar install on the production server.

This will skip the development packages and ensure the version of the packages installed on the production server match those you developped on.

NEVER run php composer.phar update on your production server.

Step 3: Configure Environments

Open bootstrap/start.php and edit the following lines to match your settings. You want to be using your machine name in Windows and your hostname in OS X and Linux (type hostname in terminal). Using the machine name will allow the php artisan command to use the right configuration files as well.

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(

    'local' => array('your-local-machine-name'),
    'staging' => array('your-staging-machine-name'),
    'production' => array('your-production-machine-name'),
));

Now create the folder inside app/config that corresponds to the environment the code is deployed in. This will most likely be local when you first start a project.

You will now be copying the initial configuration file inside this folder before editing it. Let's start with app/config/app.php. So app/config/local/app.php will probably look something like this, as the rest of the configuration can be left to their defaults from the initial config file:

<?php

return array(

    'url' => 'http://myproject.local',

    'timezone' => 'UTC',

    'key' => 'YourSecretKey!!!',

    'providers' => append_config( array(

        /* Uncomment for use in development */
        //'Way\Generators\GeneratorsServiceProvider', // Generators
        //'Barryvdh\LaravelIdeHelper\IdeHelperServiceProvider', // IDE Helpers

        )
    ),

);

Step 4: Configure Database

Now that you have the environment configured, you need to create a database configuration for it. Copy the file app/config/database.php in app/config/local and edit it to match your local database settings. You can remove all the parts that you have not changed as this configuration file will be loaded over the initial one.

Step 5: Configure Mailer

In the same fashion, copy the app/config/mail.php configuration file in app/config/local/mail.php. Now set the address and name from the from array in config/mail.php. Those will be used to send account confirmation and password reset emails to the users. If you don't set that registration will fail because it cannot send the confirmation email.

Step 6: Populate Database

Run these commands to create and populate Users table:

$ php artisan migrate
$ php artisan db:seed

Step 7: Set Encryption Key

In app/config/app.php

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Encryption Key
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| This key is used by the Illuminate encrypter service and should be set
| to a random, long string, otherwise these encrypted values will not
| be safe. Make sure to change it before deploying any application!
|
*/

'key' => 'YourSecretKey!!!',

You can use artisan to do this

$ php artisan key:generate --env=local

The --env option allows defining which environment you would like to apply the key generation. In our case, artisan generates your key in app/config/local/app.php and leaves 'YourSecretKey!!!' in app/config/app.php. Now it can be generated again when you move the project to another environment.

Step 8: Make sure app/storage is writable by your web server.

If permissions are set correctly:

$ chmod -R 775 app/storage

Should work, if not try

$ chmod -R 777 app/storage

Step 9: Start Page (Three options for proceeding)

User login with commenting permission

Navigate to your Laravel 4 website and login at /user/login:

username : user
password : user

Create a new user

Create a new user at /user/create

Admin login

Navigate to /admin

username: admin
password: admin

Application Structure

The structure of this starter site is the same as default Laravel 4 with one exception. This starter site adds a library folder. Which, houses application specific library files. The files within library could also be handled within a composer package, but is included here as an example.

Detect Language

If you want to detect the language on all pages you'll want to add the following to your routes.php at the top.

Route::when('*','detectLang');

Development

For ease of development you'll want to enable a couple useful packages. This requires editing the app/config/app.php file.

'providers' => array(
    [...]
    /* Uncomment for use in development */
//  'Way\Generators\GeneratorsServiceProvider', // Generators
//  'Barryvdh\LaravelIdeHelper\IdeHelperServiceProvider', // IDE Helpers
),

Uncomment the Generators and IDE Helpers. Then you'll want to run a composer update with the dev flag.

$ php composer.phar update

This adds the generators and ide helpers. To make it build the ide helpers automatically you'll want to modify the post-update-cmd in composer.json

"post-update-cmd": [
	"php artisan ide-helper:generate",
	"php artisan optimize"
]

Production Launch

By default debugging is enabled. Before you go to production you should disable debugging in app/config/app.php

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Application Debug Mode
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | When your application is in debug mode, detailed error messages with
    | stack traces will be shown on every error that occurs within your
    | application. If disabled, a simple generic error page is shown.
    |
    */

    'debug' => false,

Troubleshooting

Composer asking for login / password

Try using this with doing the install instead.

$ composer install --dev --prefer-source --no-interaction

License

This is free software distributed under the terms of the MIT license

Additional information

Inspired by and based on laravel4-starter-kit

Any questions, feel free to contact me.