Installing pre-built Laravel site onto local MAMP server

Question

thanks for any help in advance. I am a beginner with Laravel and PHP so please forgive me if I am not even asking the right questions.

I have a pre-built (not by me) Laravel (4) site currently on a dev server that I'm hoping to pull down onto my local machine so that I can tinker around with some CSS for some fine-finishing on the styling.

I have consulted many tutorials for Laravel set-up/config but they all seem to concern fresh Laravel installs, not for previously-built sites.

From what I can tell, Composer is already living in the site directory. I'm not sure if Composer is anything I need to worry about at this point?

So far I have: downloaded site via FTP and installed latest version of MAMP. Preparing to dump the database from phpMyAdmin. I'm basically trying to go about this as if I was dealing with a WP build (which I've done before).

Answer 1

The typical process is thussly:

• git clone (or ftp in your case) the code into your directory
• modify (or make) the .env file. Ensure all your local variables are in here for things such as database connection, etc.
• composer install
• npm install ¹
• php artisan migrate
• php artisan db:seed
• gulp ²

_Footnotes

• ¹ This may not be necessary if you don't use node for JavaScript package management in the project
• ² This may not be necessary if you don't compile assets such as sass or less or your javascript .

Most of the above is pretty standard, but you may not need to perform all the steps. Hope this helps.