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Installing Composer package manager
Laravel uses Composer, a dependency manager for PHP, very similar to Node Package Manager (NPM) for Node.js projects, PIP for Python, and Bundler for Ruby. Let's see what the official documentation says about it:
"A Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you."
So, let's install Composer, as follows:
Go to https://getcomposer.org/download/ and follow the instructions for your platform.
You can get more information at https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md.
Note that you can install Composer on your machine locally or globally; don't worry about it right now. Choose what is easiest for you.
All PHP projects that use Composer have a file called composer.json at the root project, which looks similar to the following:
{
"require": {
"laravel/framework": "5.*.*",
}
}
This is also very similar to the package.json file on Node.js and Angular applications, as we will see later in this book.
Here's a helpful link about the basic commands: https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md