Laravel Framework is for me the best framework to build any kind of web app with PHP. It has a great community, a really cool and the best videotutorials out there laracasts.com by Jeffrey Way (he is a superhero). Comes with a lot of resources out of the box, it has a cool router, eloquent for model repositories, swiftmailer for the mailing, blade engine for your templates, a system to create your migrations (think about it as a way of creating your database tables inside your PHP code, which is nice), a cache component to cache everything you want, a monolog logger, etc…

Some of the features are:

  • modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager
  • different ways for accessing relational databases though Routing
  • utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance
  • orientation toward syntactic sugar
  • easy authentication by providing a simple & easy to use interface and many more.

Server Requirements

This framework has a few system requirements. It’s highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Laravel development environment. However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:

  • PHP >= 5.5.9
  • OpenSSL PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension
  • Mbstring PHP Extension
  • Tokenizer PHP Extension

Installing Laravel

Laravel utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So make sure you have Composer installed on your machine. The best thing about Laravel is that it is a high quality framework, so learning how to use it you become a better programmer in PHP in general. I recommend you to give it a try and you will never regret it.