Create Your First Project with NativePHP

Hey everyone, if you’ve made it to this part, I’m guessing you’ve gone through the earlier lessons already. If not, go back and check out our previous guide first: Getting Started with NativePHP – Install Laravel – FoxDevelop. Now we’ll walk through building our very first project.

We’ll start from scratch and set up a brand-new project:

Make an empty folder on your PC to hold project files, for example: D:\phpproject

Open CMD pointing to this directory quickly: type cmd directly into the folder’s address bar then hit Enter; your command window will pop up and switch paths automatically.

Run these commands below:

composer create-project --prefer-dist nativephp/mobile-starter my-app
cd my-app
php artisan native:jump

Quick troubleshooting note (skip this section if you’re running PHP 8.3)

composer create-project --prefer-dist nativephp/mobile-starter my-app
Creating a "nativephp/mobile-starter" project at "./my-app"
Installing nativephp/mobile-starter (1.0.4)
  - Downloading nativephp/mobile-starter (1.0.4)
  - Installing nativephp/mobile-starter (1.0.4): Extracting archive
Created project in D:\phpproject\my-app
> @php -r "file_exists('.env') || copy('.env.example', '.env');"
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

  Problem 1
    - Root composer.json requires nativephp/mobile ^3.0 -> satisfiable by nativephp/mobile[3.0.0, ..., 3.3.5].
    - nativephp/mobile[3.0.0, ..., 3.3.5] require php ^8.3 -> your php version (8.2.31) does not satisfy that requirement.

The error happens because my local PHP is version 8.2; we need to upgrade to PHP 8.3 to proceed.

https://windows.php.net/download#php-8.3

Head to that page to grab PHP 8.3. Windows 64-bit users can directly download the package below:

https://downloads.php.net/~windows/releases/archives/php-8.3.31-nts-Win32-vs16-x64.zip

Once downloaded, extract all contents into D:\php8.3. You can pick your own folder path, just stick with English characters only.

After extraction, rename the config file:
Rename php.ini-development to php.ini

Open php.ini and uncomment lines by deleting the leading semicolons;

Remove semicolon comments for all entries listed here (critical step):

extension_dir = "ext"
extension=curl
extension=gd
extension=mbstring
extension=mysqli
extension=pdo_mysql
extension=zip
extension=openssl
extension=fileinfo
extension=sqlite3
extension=pdo_sqlite

Update your system environment variables, swap the old D:\php8.2 path with D:\php8.3.

Verify your PHP install with php -v; if the version checks out, resume project setup.

Resume NativePHP Mobile project creation

Now run the installation commands again:

composer create-project --prefer-dist nativephp/mobile-starter my-app
cd my-app

A clean successful install won’t throw any red error text in the terminal.

To test on a real physical phone, plug your device into your PC via USB first, then turn on Developer Options and USB Debugging on your handset.

Use the following command for quick physical-device testing (Real device quick start: Install the Jump App on your phone and scan a QR code to connect for debugging, no full APK compile needed):

php artisan native:jump

If you don’t have a physical mobile device, use this alternative command for emulator testing:

php artisan native:serve : For desktop preview or emulator testing (opens a standalone app window on your computer)

When everything works properly you’ll see output similar to below after running php artisan native:jump

php artisan native:jump

NativePHP Jump Server

Laravel server ……………………………………………………………………. http://127.0.0.1:8000
Laravel warmup ………………………………………………………………… ready in 0.42s (HTTP 200)

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser to view your running app content.