There are no major differences in installing and going through initial setup for Laravel 4 and 5. I also came aboard to Laravel when it was version 4, and going from 4 to 5 in terms of setting it up is almost the same. Can you explain what were the problems with setting up version 5 compared to 4?

I don't remember the specifics, so I went into my Arch Linux box today and tried an install. Right from the start there's problems. My Arch Linux box is a clean install. So, had to install composer. I'm a complete composer newbie because I've had problems with it and have given up on trying to fight it. But here I am again.

So, I installed composer. Next, I installed laravel.

Laravel documentation says:

Make sure to place the $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your $PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system.

There is no $HOME/.composer directory. Turns out, it's in $HOME/.config/composer. Took several minutes of digging to discover this path. That's the first thing.

Now for creating an application. "laravel new whatever". I get: Crafting application... sh: composer: command not found

composer IS in my PATH. I just ran it to install laravel! So, WHAT THE FUDGE!??!!?!

Ok, back go the beginning. What did I do wrong with the composer installation? I mean, it worked fine to install laravel, so it must be installed okay, right? Wrong. I installed locally and apparently, laravel doesn't like that. Had to move composer to /usr/local/bin.

(NOTE: Having to hit Shift-ENTER for a new line here on hashnode is a pain. ENTER submits the post before I'm ready and I keep forgetting Shift-ENTER for a new line!!!!)

Finally, got the application created. I'm into this 30 minutes already. Should have been done in less than 5. But whatever. At this point, I have other things to do today, so am not going to spend more time with this. But, you get the picture.

My other issues with composer historically had to do with dependencies. Errors that indicate that dependencies are not found, and I'd have to go locate them and install them... stuff like that. For a dependency manager, I have not at all been impressed.

I may use it in the future, but when a technology that is supposed to make the job easier ends up making it harder, I tend to stay away from it. I know that in future employment, I'll probably be forced to use it. For now, I avoid it if I can. I don't have time for the frustrations it gives me.

EDIT: See, an issue like this bugs me but since it's Sunday, I had some time to work on this. Since I was working on a clean Linux install, I had to do some system updates and install and configure Apache. Took a couple of hours, but finally saw the Laravel page in my browser. End-to-end, just getting up and running with a clean install of everything took approximately three and a half hours. Not bad, but could be better. Composer and permissions took me the longest. Kept getting 403 errors in Apache, so had to figure that one out.

I still say Laravel is the best framework to start with, even if getting up and running is a bit painful. My pain, of course, was not due to Laravel itself.

@MikeClassic As I mentioned, I use Code-Igniter for past few years and I'm pretty much content with it. In fact, most of my freelancing projects are done with it and they are running just fine. One thing with laravel is, the learning curve is too much. When I moved from CI to use Laravel, I had hard time getting it up and running the way I wanted, which I would have done with CI-like frameworks in minutes time. So only thing stopping me from going on full Laravel is, the learning curve and the ease of configuring which CI provides. For full on PHP developers, this might not be the case, but for me, it is!