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PatrickDaniel's avatar

Methods to make following older content easier

When trying to watch older videos on Laracasts, a lot of the time I end up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to bridge the gap between the versions of the tools that are used in the videos and the versions that I have locally. Because of this, I've resigned myself to prioritizing watching the most recent videos as opposed to the ones closest to the topics that I am trying to learn- a first world problem, but one that leaves me feeling like I'm missing something.

I recently learned that you could do something along the lines of composer create-project laravel/laravel <name> "5.0" to have the 'correct' version to minimize the discrepancies between what's on the video and what's going on locally.

From what little I know about docker it seems like that might be a good direction to go into in order to customize the environment.

What I'm looking for are techniques that others use or common gotchas to look out for when following older videos. Should I just be more diligent and when I run into an error with a tool just look up the version that was out on the date the video was released and change my composer.json or what have you?

Any help appreciated, what's obvious to you might be just the low-hanging fruit that I'm looking for, feel free to dumb it down. Thanks.

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jlrdw's avatar
jlrdw
Best Answer
Level 75

I would say stick with laravel 6 and higher.

While learning you could have more than one project installed locally, a version 6, 7, and 8.

The laravel from scratch will give you good basics to learn newer versions.

Remember many things (stacks) are optional, like livewire, inertia, etc. Also a stack might come with tailwind, but completely optional, you can choose what css you want to use.

I use fetch js and regular js, bootstrap and plain css.

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