inertia start
Getting Started

Installation

How to install and set up your Inertia Start project.

Follow these steps to get your Inertia Start project up and running on your local machine. You can also refer to the official Laravel installation guide for more details.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following installed on your system:

  • PHP 8.3 or higher
  • Composer
  • Node.js 20 or higher
  • NPM or Yarn or Bun

Installation Steps

Get the Source Code

Everything starts from the Inertia Start product page of your account. Sign in with the account that purchased the license: an active license is required to clone the repository or to download a release.

Choose your variant

Inertia Start ships in two variants, built from the same repository:

VariantBranchContents
StandardmainThe full starter kit, without the Teams feature.
TeamsteamsEverything in Standard, plus multi-team support with roles, permissions, and email invitations.

Pick the one that matches your project. If you are unsure, see the Teams feature documentation to decide whether you need multi-team support.

Cloning is the recommended option: you keep the full Git history and can pull future updates easily.

The repository is served from your account and authenticated with an API key. On the product page, open the API keys section, give the key a name (for example the machine you are working on) and create it. The key is displayed only once, so copy it right away.

Then clone the repository, using your API key as the username:

git clone https://[email protected]/git/inertia-start.git

To start from the Teams variant, clone the teams branch instead:

git clone -b teams https://[email protected]/git/inertia-start.git

About API keys

You can have up to 2 active API keys at a time. Create one per device or CI environment, and revoke the ones you no longer use from the same section of the product page. Access is read-only: you can clone and pull, but never push to the Inertia Start repository. Push your project to your own remote instead.

Set up your remotes

The repository you just cloned is read-only, so origin is not where your own project belongs. Rename it and point origin to your own repository:

cd inertia-start

# We name the remote `core` in this example, but you can name it as you like
git remote rename origin core

git remote add origin https://your-git-host.com/your-org/your-app.git

From there, git push origin main publishes your project, while core stays available to pull future Inertia Start releases. This is all the setup the Updating guide needs later on.

Install Composer Dependencies

From your project directory:

composer install

Environment Setup

When running composer install, the .env.example file has been copied to .env.

By default, Laravel will use a SQLite database. If you want to use an existing database, open the .env file and configure your database driver and credentials.

More information on the supported databases and the configuration in the Laravel database documentation.

Example with a MySQL database:

.env
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=

Finally, run the Inertia Start setup command that will ensure everything is ready:

composer run setup

This command will:

  • install Composer and Node.js dependencies
  • ensure all required files and environment variables exist
  • create the database and run migrations
  • configure the billing provider
  • build the frontend assets
  • generate a secure link to create a Super Admin (if one doesn't exist yet)

When run from your terminal, it walks you through the interactive steps (such as choosing your billing provider). When run in a non-interactive environment such as CI, it skips the prompts and performs a deterministic setup.

Serve the Application

For local development, start all the development processes (application server, Horizon queue worker, Reverb WebSocket server, logs, and the Vite dev server with hot module replacement) with a single command:

composer run dev

Visit the URL displayed in your terminal to view your application.

You can inspect the registered processes at any time with php artisan dev:list.

Serve with Herd

Laravel Herd is a blazing fast, native Laravel and PHP development environment for macOS and Windows. Herd includes everything you need to get started with Laravel development, including PHP and Nginx.

Getting started with Herd.

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