Getting Started With Laravel 12

Let me be honest before you spend six minutes here. Laravel 13 shipped on March 17, 2026. So why write about Laravel 12? Because 12 is what most production apps run today, it keeps getting security fixes until February 24, 2027, and if you are joining a team or picking up a client project this year, 12 is almost certainly what you will meet. Learning it is not learning the past, it is learning the present.

Laravel 12 requires PHP 8.2 or newer, plus Composer. That is the whole list. If you can run php and composer in a terminal, you can start. Laravel 13 raised the floor to PHP 8.3, which is one of the practical reasons many hosts and teams are still on 12.

Two commands and you have a running app.

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-app
cd my-app
php artisan serve

Open localhost on port 8000 and Laravel is serving. By default it uses SQLite, which means no database setup at all for your first day. This sounds like a small thing. It is not. Twenty years ago I lost whole evenings to configuring a local LAMP stack before writing a single line of my own code.

Laravel 12 replaced the old Breeze and Jetstream kits with new official starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire, built on Inertia 2 and TypeScript. They give you auth, registration, and a sensible frontend setup on day one. My advice depends on who you are. If you are new to Laravel, skip the kits at first and build one tiny app with plain Blade templates, because you will learn what the framework actually does instead of what the kit hides. If you already know the framework, take the kit that matches your frontend and save yourself a week.

Laravel 12 was a deliberately quiet release, and I mean that as a compliment. Models using HasUuids now generate ordered UUIDv7 values instead of random v4, which makes database indexes happier. Carbon 3 is now the only supported date library. The image validation rule stopped accepting SVGs by default, which is the right security call. If you are coming from Laravel 11, the upgrade is one of the easiest major versions in years.

Do it in this order and resist skipping ahead. Routes first, understand how a URL becomes a response. Then Blade views, then Eloquent models and migrations, then forms with validation. Build one small real thing end to end, a bookmarks list, a habit tracker, anything you would actually use. One finished small app teaches more than ten started tutorials. That is not a Laravel lesson, that is a building lesson, but Laravel makes it cheap to learn.

Starting a brand new project with no legacy constraints and PHP 8.3 available? Look at Laravel 13 first. It brings an official AI SDK, first party JSON API resources, and stronger request forgery protection. But if your host, your team, or your existing codebase says 12, you are not behind. You are on a supported, stable version with a clear upgrade path, and everything in this guide transfers almost unchanged.

The framework version matters less than most arguments about it. What is the small real app you would build this weekend to learn it?