Getting Started

30 Nov 2014

Getting started with Orchestra Platform 3 is as much identical to getting started with Orchestra Platform 2. Therefore you need to have some minimum knowledge on Laravel 5, Composer and Packagist.

I would highly recommend watching Laravel 5 From Scratch video series from Laracasts in order to get familiar with Laravel 5 to understand some of the approach we use in Orchestra Platform 3.

Video

Instruction

Firstly, run the following command to download Orchestra Platform 3 using Composer:

$ composer create-project orchestra/platform patio dev-master --prefer-dist --dev

Once Orchestra Platform v3.0 is released, you can swap dev-master with 3.0.x.

This composer command would create a new project for you on patio folder using the latest development build, --prefer-dist is another option that you can use to indicate that you want to download a distributed version instead of cloning the repository, otherwise use --prefer-source.

Setup database

Next, login to MySQL client. For this example I'm using the default MySQL command line tool and create a new patio database:

$ mysql -uroot -p

mysql> create database `patio` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit

Changing the configuration file

Open config/database.php from any of your favourite IDE and edit the following based on your database connection credential:

<?php

return [

    // ...

    'connections' => [

        // ...

        'mysql' => [
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => 'localhost',
            'database'  => 'patio',
            'username'  => 'root',
            'password'  => 'root',
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
        ],

        // ...

    ],

    // ...

];

Using the built in PHP Server

This is an easy approach to start using Orchestra Platform 3 without using either Apache or Nginx.

$ cd patio
$ php artisan serve
Laravel development server started on http://localhost:8000

In the next tutorial, we will look into using Vaprobash.

Installation

Now browse to http://localhost:8000, you should see the default Laravel 5 welcome page. Now let install Orchestra Platform, to do that simply browse to http://localhost:8000/admin and complete the installation process.

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