Laravel Spark

This week we will try to explore Laravel Spark. The main goal of Laravel Spark is in building out business oriented SaaS applications. It has features like user roles, team management, recurring billing through Stripe and many more. If you have developed a team management and a billing system manually you would know how much time it consumes. But by using Spark it is so easy it takes care of all the designing and invoice creation process. Even though it has been commercialised  it is worth buying which makes us focus a lot on our business.

There are two ways to install one by using a installer and other by a manual process .

We will now see the implementation part. Before installing we need to know the few requirements of Laravel Spark.

* Laravel Framework 5.2

* Laravel Elixir

* Composer

* Bootstrap 3

Spark uses  vue.js a Javascript Framework on the registration and setting page. But it is our choice do we use the framework or not. We can install using a installer by downloading the Spark Installer. Laravel Spark has a very handy installer which will create a new Larval application and installs the Spark in the directory which we chose.

Note: Care must be taken to install Laravel installer before we go for a Spark installer.

First we need to clone the Laravel/spark-installer repository from GitHub to any location in our machine. Once we have cloned the installer we must make sure to run the composer install command within the cloned directory so that all the dependencies get installed automatically.

Note: Care must be taken to add the spark-installer directory to the system $PATH variable to locate the Spark executable file.

Registering our API token

We can create an API token from the settings dashboard which can be used with the installer using  register command

           spark register token-value

To view the currently registered token, we can use

          spark token

Creating a Spark Project

We can easily create a Spark project once we have installed the Spark installer and registered our API token  using the below command

          spark new project_name

The above command creates a Laravel project with the given project_name. Spark gets installed and configured automatically.

Note: We need to do the database migration with php artisan migrate command.

Once all the above task is done we can start configuring our application.

Manual Download Method

We can Manually also configure the same using the “ZIP” archive.

Step 1 :  Extract the content of the zip and place it into our project root directory.

Step 2 :  Add spark directory as repository to our projects composer.json file.

Screen Shot 2016-04-26 at 12.16.28 PM

Step 3 :  Add laravel/spark requirement to your composer.json file

Screen Shot 2016-04-26 at 12.17.09 PM

Step 4 : Run composer update command  so that all the dependencies will get installed

Step 5 : Add LaravelSparkProvidersSparkServiceProvider class to our app.php configuration

file.

Step 6 : Run spark:install  in the command prompt

Screen Shot 2016-04-26 at 12.21.39 PM

Step 7 :  Add the below service providers to our app.php configuration file

Screen Shot 2016-04-26 at 12.18.58 PM

Note: Care must be taken to install npm, gulp, and php artisan migrate commands.

Hope this blog has given you a basic Idea on what Laravel Spark is and how to install it. we will come back with a more interesting blog in the upcoming weeks.

 

Vijayanand P,
PHP Team Lead,
Mallow Technologies.

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