Note: In the years since releasing Lumen, PHP has made a variety of wonderful performance improvements. For this reason, along with the availability of Laravel Octane, we no longer recommend that you begin new projects with Lumen. Instead, we recommend always beginning new projects with Laravel.
The Lumen framework has a few system requirements. Of course, all of these requirements are satisfied by the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, so it's highly recommended that you use Homestead as your local Lumen development environment.
However, if you are not using Homestead, you will need to make sure your server meets the following requirements:
Lumen utilizes Composer to manage its dependencies. So, before using Lumen, make sure you have Composer installed on your machine.
Install Lumen by issuing the Composer create-project command in your terminal:
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/lumen blogTo serve your project locally, you may use the Laravel Homestead virtual machine, Laravel Valet, or the built-in PHP development server:
php -S localhost:8000 -t publicAll of the configuration options for the Lumen framework are stored in the .env file. Once Lumen is installed, you should also configure your local environment.
The next thing you should do after installing Lumen is set your application key to a random string. Typically, this string should be 32 characters long. The key can be set in the .env environment file. If you have not renamed the .env.example file to .env, you should do that now. If the application key is not set, your user encrypted data will not be secure!
Since Lumen is a totally separate framework from Laravel, it does not intentionally offer compatibility with any additional Laravel libraries like Cashier, Passport, Scout, etc. If your application requires the functionality provided by these libraries, please use the Laravel framework.