The 'Best Way' to Setup Laravel 4

!! WAIT !!:

This article was written when Laravel was in Beta and is no longer relevant. I suggest now using composer to install laravel, via the command line:

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel /path/to/install/directory

Here's the old content, for posterity, or something:

First, clone the repository.

You need to clone the develop branch of the repository while it's in Beta. Here's the command I use:

$ git clone -o laravel -b develop https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git project-name

Lots of options there.

-o laravel names the remote pointing to the laravel/laravel repository 'laravel'
-b develop clones the 'develop' branch
project-name clones the project into a new directory of name 'project-name' (or whatever you choose to name it)

To update

Now, later down the line, say you want to get all the latest code from the beta. First, you can update the skeleton app. The following command will pull down any changes to the skeleton app, including anything new in the repo's composer.json. This tells git to pull in the latest code from the laravel/laravel repo's develop branch.

$ git pull laravel develop

Then you can update the composer-registered libraries:

$ php composer update

Last note:

You'll want to set the "origin" remote to your own git repo, so you can run git push origin develop and similar commands as usual:

$ git remote add origin URL_OF_YOUR_GIT_REPO_HERE

Update:

You may also want to try this method. This will result in more merge conflicts, but can keep your commit history cleaner. The method above keeps all of laravel/laravel's commit history in your repo.

@fideloper gist.github.com/akuzemchak/521…
— Aaron Kuzemchak (@akuzemchak) March 21, 2013