Installing Composer package manager

Laravel uses Composer, a dependency manager for PHP, very similar to Node Package Manager (NPM) for Node.js projects, PIP for Python, and Bundler for Ruby. Let's see what the official documentation says about it: 

So, let's install Composer, as follows:

Go to https://getcomposer.org/download/ and follow the instructions for your platform.

Note that you can install Composer on your machine locally or globally; don't worry about it right now. Choose what is easiest for you.

All PHP projects that use Composer have a file called composer.json at the root project, which looks similar to the following:

{
 "require": {
     "laravel/framework": "5.*.*",
 }
}

This is also very similar to the package.json file on Node.js and Angular applications, as we will see later in this book.