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Laravel is a free,open source PHP web application framework, designed for the development of MVC web applications. Laravel, being a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. Laravel is accessible, yet powerful, providing powerful tools needed for large, robust applications.
Some features of laravel:

• Easy and convenient templating using Blade, a great templating engine built for Laravel.
• Awesome routing facilities.
• Eloquent, an elegant and one-of-a-kind object-relational mapper.
• Artisan, Laravel’s amazing CLI, which helps with database migrations, project management, and so on … you can even create your own commands.
• A modular architecture powered by Composer, which makes it easier to build scalable and less coupled apps.
• Amazing documentation.
• An active and supportive community.
• Marvelous testing facilities to make sure your apps are doing what you think they are etc.

Eloquent Driver: It is driver provided by laravel. Eloquent is also the name of the ORM which Laravel provides, for abstracting model data. It is similar in that it will ultimately query a database to determine whether a user is authentic, but the interface which it uses to make that determination is quite different from direct database queries. If you’re using Laravel to build medium-to-large applications, then you stand a good chance of using Eloquent models to represent database objects.

Laravel Installation
One method of installation is by directly downloading and extracting the laravel files in a directory and installing it.This method is as follows:

• 1) Download the laravel application from this url https://github.com/laravel/laravel/archive/master.zip.
• 2) Extract it to root directory.
• 3) Download composer.phar from this url https://getcomposer.org/download/
• 4) At the root directory install composer using terminal.
  
  php composer.phar install

  1	php composer.phar install

• 5) Point url to “domainname/project folder/public” will output the welcome screen.
• 6) To add additional libraries then modify composer.json file and update it through terminal.
  
  php composer.phar update

  1	php composer.phar update

• 7) For some OS we need to install PHP JSON extension by executing following code in terminal.
  
  apt-get install php5-json

  1	apt-get install php5-json

Another method through laravel installer:

• 1) download the Laravel installer PHAR archive.
• 2) Move this .phar file to /usr/local/bin/
• 3) In terminal, go to install path and run below command to install fresh laravel
  
  laravel new

  1	laravel new

Another method through composer:

• 1) Download the Laravel composer.phar archive.
• 2) Move this .phar file to /usr/local/bin/
• Run the following command in the teminal window
  
  composer create-project laravel/laravel –prefer-dist

  1	composer create-project laravel/laravel –prefer-dist

After this successfull installation from any of the above method we have to configure some files in the laravel project according to our requirement.

Database configuration

• 1) Create database for this project
• 2) Modify app/config/database.php file and add the databse details
• 3) To access database the following format is used.
  DB::select(), DB::insert(), DB::update(), DB::delete()
  eg: DB::insert(‘insert into users (id, name) values (?, ?)’, array(1, ‘Dayle’));
• 4) we can override any config files by placing it in app/config/local directory.

URL configuration
modify app/config/app.php file and edit the base urls and other details related to project.

Now your application ready to access via browsers!