Installing an in-development version of Laravel

I'm often writing here about features in the latest version of Laravel. You might be wondering, how do I install the latest version if I want to try it out?

Disclaimer: If you do this, you're going to be installing an under-development, almost- guaranteed-to-have-bugs version of Laravel. Things will break, and you can't expect any customer support until it's released.

Fresh Install

The simplest option is to just to use Composer to install a fresh app from the develop branch:

$ composer create-project laravel/laravel your-project-name-here dev-develop

Upgrade install

If you need to upgrade, it's a little more complex, because you might find dependency issues, and you won't have the upgrade guide to show you what changes you need to make to your files. But if you're willing to risk it:

1. Update the minimum-stability property in your composer.json to be dev. If it doesn't exist, just add it to the bottom of composer.json ("minimum-stability": "dev")
2. Update the laravel/framework version to be the version you want to use. So, if you're running 5.0 and want to try out 5.1, update it to be: "laravel/framework": "5.1.*"
3. Composer update
4. Fix things that break because you don't have an upgrade guide available for you yet

That's it! Enjoy!