Lumen is the smaller but faster brother of the popular Laravel Framework. And faster means less features out of the box.

Starting a new Lumen framework is quite easy, once you have the Lumne installer globally installed. I can recommend that.

Install Lumen installer globally

composer global require "laravel/lumen-installer=~1.0"

Once you have installed a new Lumen framework, you actually have to do a few things extra:

• copy the example.env to .env
• generate an app key

With Laravel you can issue the command php artisan key:generate to generate the key, but Lumen doesn’t have that feature. Remember it’s smaller to be faster.

Of course you can do it manually, but let’s create a small shell script to do a few things manually.

A helper-script for a new Lumen install

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then

#setup default directory
cd /home/user/web

lumen new $1

cd $1

cp .env.example .env

key=`php -r "echo md5(uniqid()).\"\n\";"`;

sed -i "s/APP_KEY=SomeRandomKey!!!/APP_KEY=$key/" .env

fi

Save the script as newlumen.sh in ~/bin, set the appropriate execute permission and you can install a new Lumen framework, by running:

newlumen.sh website

It will run all the mentioned steps above automatically:

1. create a new Lumen install
2. copy the .env file
3. generate an application key in the .env file