I'm in my third week of trying to install any Laravel project, with laravel5-example being the latest one. I'm using Windows 7. I've tried via XAMPP, I've installed composer, Virtual-box and Vagrant.
One tutorial had me installing Node.js. I've tried to install Homestead to no avail. Everything, at some point, results in errors which are never mentioned in the tutorials.
I've downloaded about ten projects in the hopes of learning something about Laravel, with zero luck. It seems that everyone has a different method and everyone leaves out crucial steps, or gives an instruction like "launch it" but doesn't instruct how to do that.
I've tried installing in
C:\xampp
C:\xampp\htdocs
C:\users{username}\AppData\Roaming
C:\
and others.
I've watched countless video tutorials, read countless StackOverflow threads, and in 21 days I've achieved nothing. Not even close to just seeing a project run on my machine.
I haven't been this disgusted since Windows 8 was released! Can anyone point me to something that really is for a beginner? I thought I'd be learning Laravel by now and after attempting for several hours per day for three weeks, I haven't gotten past installing whatever Laravel needs to even run.
Thank you
If you don't want to have any troubles with installation, try to use Homestead which is independent from your OS. All you need is install VMWare and Vagrant like any other Windows software. Then install Homestead using these instructions:
https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/homestead
In that case, you will not need cofiguring and running any Windows servers like XAMPP.
Also, try to turn off a firewall while you're installing Homestead and Laravel, because newbies have a lot of problems caused by firewall.
Try installing Homestead and if you'll meet any troubles, come back here and we'll help you to fix them.