bazzdream/Laravel-5-Foundation-5-Starter

#Laravel 5 Foundation 5 Starter

Laravel 5 Foundation 5 Starter is a sample application for beginning development with Laravel 5 for the backend and Zurb Foundation 5 for the frontend.

Features (for now)

Foundation 5.x
Custom Error Pages
- 403 for forbidden page accesses
- 404 for not found pages
- 500 for internal server errors
Asset Management
- Gulp tasks for merging and minifying assets
Packages included:

Issues

See github issue list for current list.

Recommendations

I recommend that you use Gulp to compile and minify your assets. See the /gulpfile.js for a demo. Also i recommend that you use Vagrant in VMWare or VirtualBox with Laravels Homestead to get a modern, nice and working dev environment.

##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/bazzdream/Laravel-5-Foundation-5-Starter.git laravel

Option 2: Download the repository

https://github.com/bazzdream/Laravel-5-Foundation-5-Starter/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 developed on.

!!!NEVER!!! run composer update on your production server.

Step 3: Use Bower and NPM to install the frontend dependencies

$ npm install
$ bower install

This is required to get the latest Foundation 5 framework and other dependencies right in your project. The Zurb Foundation library and other bower components are located resources/assets/bower as defined in .bowerrc.

Step 4: Configure Environment

Duplicate the .env.example and rename to .env to configure your environment to your needs. Also this new file will not be pushed to your repo as you can see in .gitignore.

Step 5: Migrate Database/Tables

Run this command to create the default Users table:

$ php artisan migrate

Step 6: Set Encryption Key

You can use artisan to do this

$ php artisan key:generate

Step 7: Make sure /storage is writable by your web server.

If permissions are set correctly:

$ chmod -R 775 storage

Should work, if not try

$ chmod -R 777 storage

Application Structure

The structure of this starter site is the same as default Laravel 5.

Asset Management

With the use of Gulp and Laravel 5 elixir the automation of tasks is like magic. See gulpfile.js to get an overview where the Gulp task runner will handle our assets after running:

$ gulp && gulp watch

This will minify and merge our assets. Cool, huh?

Development

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

'providers' => [
    [...]
    /* Uncomment for use in development */
    //  'Laracasts\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 update --dev

This adds the generators and ide helpers. To make it build the ide helpers automatically the post-update-cmd in composer.json is modified like this:

"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 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' => env('APP_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 Laravel-4-Bootstrap-Starter-Site

Any questions? Feel free to contact me.

bazzdream / Laravel-5-Foundation-5-Starter