This guide walks you through every step needed to get a fully functional local copy of Mega Creative running on your machine — from cloning the repository to seeing a seeded database populated with sample students and academic programs, all accessible through the built-in Laravel development server.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/keving5726/megacreative/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, make sure the following tools are installed and available in yourPATH:
- PHP 7.2 or higher — Laravel 6 requires at least PHP 7.2. Verify with
php -v. - Composer — PHP dependency manager. Install from getcomposer.org.
- Node.js and npm — Required for compiling front-end assets with Laravel Mix / Webpack. Verify with
node -vandnpm -v. - MySQL — The default database driver. A local MySQL server (or a compatible drop-in such as MariaDB) must be running and accessible.
- Git — To clone the repository.
Installation Steps
Clone the repository
Clone the Mega Creative repository from GitHub and navigate into the project directory:
Install PHP dependencies
Use Composer to install all server-side packages defined in Composer will create a
composer.json (Laravel 6 framework, Tinker, Faker, PHPUnit, and others):vendor/ directory and generate the optimised autoloader.Install Node.js dependencies
Install the front-end toolchain — Laravel Mix, Bootstrap 4, jQuery, Popper.js, Font Awesome, Sass, and Webpack — via npm:
Create your environment file and generate the application key
Copy the provided example file to create your local Then generate a unique 32-character application encryption key. Laravel will write it directly into
.env:APP_KEY inside your new .env file:Configure the database connection
Open Make sure the database named in
.env in your editor and update the database block to match your local MySQL credentials:DB_DATABASE already exists in MySQL. You can create it quickly from a MySQL prompt:Run database migrations
Execute all migration files to create the full table structure — students, academic programs, and all supporting lookup tables:Laravel will report each migration as it runs and confirm the total number of tables created.
Seed the database
Populate the database with sample data using the configured seeders:This command runs all seeder classes registered in
DatabaseSeeder.php, inserting reference data for countries, states, cities, sex options, and statuses, as well as 100 sample students and 10 academic programs generated with Faker.Build front-end assets
Compile Sass stylesheets and bundle JavaScript files for the development environment:Output files (
app.css, app.js) will be written to public/css/ and public/js/ respectively.Start the development server
Launch the built-in PHP development server via Artisan:The application will be available at http://localhost:8000. Open that URL in your browser to confirm everything is working.
Verifying the Installation
After completing all steps above, you should see the Mega Creative home page athttp://localhost:8000. To confirm the database was seeded correctly, navigate to the students list — you should find 100 student records already present, each with randomised names, dates of birth, and geographic data courtesy of Faker.
The academic programs list should contain 10 pre-seeded Carrera entries, each with a name and a status of either Habilitado or Inhabilitado. All geographic lookup dropdowns (country, state, city) in the student forms will be fully populated from the reference seeders.
If any records appear to be missing, you can re-run the seeder at any time:
migrate:fresh drops all tables and re-runs every migration from scratch before seeding. Use it only in local development — never against a production database.