After browsing the internet I quickly realized that to even begin writing any PHP code I'd need to download a few things. The only useful application I have pre downloaded was VS Code, which I later used. I began watching tutorials on youtube, most of which were outdated therefore useless to me but eventually I found a newer video and followed along.

• All was going well until I received this error message.

But not to worry, I was sure I could figure this out. I had previously used MySQL on other projects I worked on so I was sure that was the issue and resolved it in no time. Below is how I achieved this.

I went to my old trusted cmd prlook at what was listening on this port it was number 8272

Went to Administrator Command Prompt and discovered it was mysql, which was the problem to begin with.

I then went to services and stopped mysql

I ran them both again and they seem to be working.

Next challenge i faced was that i wanted to use the 'php artisan make:auth' command to have laravel register and login users etc but when i went to use the command it had been removed from newer versions of laravel.

So I seached about this issue and found a solution. I used the command 'composer require laravel/ui' in my command prompt to install the laravel/ui package via the composer. I then used the command 'php artisan ui:auth' to generate the authentication scaffolding in the same way the old command used to.

This then gave me a LOGIN and REGISTER options on the top right of my PHP application.