For many operations, the Stripe and Braintree implementations of Cashier function the same. Both services provide subscription billing with credit cards but Braintree also supports payments via PayPal. However, Braintree also lacks some features that are supported by Stripe. You should keep the following in mind when deciding to use Stripe or Braintree:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- Braintree supports PayPal while Stripe does not.

- Braintree does not support the `increment` and `decrement` methods on subscriptions. This is a Braintree limitation, not a Cashier limitation.

- Braintree does not support percentage based discounts. This is a Braintree limitation, not a Cashier limitation.

</div>

The Laravel source code is managed on GitHub, and there are repositories for each of the Laravel projects:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- [Laravel Application](https://github.com/laravel/laravel)

- [Laravel Art](https://github.com/laravel/art)

- [Laravel Documentation](https://github.com/laravel/docs)

- [Laravel Socialite](https://github.com/laravel/socialite)

- [Laravel Telescope](https://github.com/laravel/telescope)

- [Laravel Website](https://github.com/laravel/laravel.com)

</div>

<a name="core-development-discussion"></a>

Laravel makes interacting with databases extremely simple across a variety of database backends using either raw SQL, the [fluent query builder](/docs/{{version}}/queries), and the [Eloquent ORM](/docs/{{version}}/eloquent). Currently, Laravel supports four databases:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- MySQL

- PostgreSQL

- SQLite

- SQL Server

</div>

<a name="configuration"></a>

Database tables are often related to one another. For example, a blog post may have many comments, or an order could be related to the user who placed it. Eloquent makes managing and working with these relationships easy, and supports several different types of relationships:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- [One To One](#one-to-one)

- [One To Many](#one-to-many)

- [Many To Many](#many-to-many)

- [Has Many Through](#has-many-through)

- [One To One (Polymorphic)](#one-to-one-polymorphic-relations)

- [One To Many (Polymorphic)](#one-to-many-polymorphic-relations)

- [Many To Many (Polymorphic)](#many-to-many-polymorphic-relations)

</div>

<a name="defining-relationships"></a>

You may provide one of the following as the channel argument:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- To send the notification to a channel: `#channel`

- To send the notification to a user: `@user`

</div>

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- Ubuntu 18.04

- Git

- PHP 7.3

- Zend Z-Ray

- Go

- Minio

</div>

<a name="installation-and-setup"></a>

By default, the following ports are forwarded to your Homestead environment:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- **SSH:** 2222 &rarr; Forwards To 22

- **ngrok UI:** 4040 &rarr; Forwards To 4040

- **HTTP:** 8000 &rarr; Forwards To 80

- **MongoDB:** 27017 &rarr; Forwards To 27017

- **Mailhog:** 8025 &rarr; Forwards To 8025

- **Minio:** 9600 &rarr; Forwards To 9600

</div>

Make sure to place composer's system-wide vendor bin directory in your `$PATH` so the laravel executable can be located by your system. This directory exists in different locations based on your operating system; however, some common locations include:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- macOS: `$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin`

- GNU / Linux Distributions: `$HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin`

</div>

Once installed, the `laravel new` command will create a fresh Laravel installation in the directory you specify. For instance, `laravel new blog` will create a directory named `blog` containing a fresh Laravel installation with all of Laravel's dependencies already installed:

You may also want to configure a few additional components of Laravel, such as:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- [Cache](/docs/{{version}}/cache#configuration)

- [Database](/docs/{{version}}/database#configuration)

- [Session](/docs/{{version}}/session#configuration)

</div>

<a name="web-server-configuration"></a>

With this single line of code, you may now take advantage of:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- ES2015 syntax.

- Modules

- Compilation of `.vue` files.

- Minification for production environments.

</div>

<a name="vendor-extraction"></a>

The `extract` method accepts an array of all libraries or modules that you wish to extract into a `vendor.js` file. Using the above snippet as an example, Mix will generate the following files:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- `public/js/manifest.js`: *The Webpack manifest runtime*

- `public/js/vendor.js`: *Your vendor libraries*

- `public/js/app.js`: *Your application code*

</div>

To avoid JavaScript errors, be sure to load these files in the proper order:

The following dependencies are needed for the listed queue drivers:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- Amazon SQS: `aws/aws-sdk-php ~3.0`

- Beanstalkd: `pda/pheanstalk ~3.0`

- Redis: `predis/predis ~1.0`

</div>

<a name="creating-jobs"></a>

The session `driver` configuration option defines where session data will be stored for each request. Laravel ships with several great drivers out of the box:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- `file` - sessions are stored in `storage/framework/sessions`.

- `cookie` - sessions are stored in secure, encrypted cookies.

- `database` - sessions are stored in a relational database.

- `memcached` / `redis` - sessions are stored in one of these fast, cache based stores.

- `array` - sessions are stored in a PHP array and will not be persisted.

</div>

Since the purpose of these methods is not readily understandable, let's quickly cover what each of the methods do:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- The `open` method would typically be used in file based session store systems. Since Laravel ships with a `file` session driver, you will almost never need to put anything in this method. You can leave it as an empty stub. It is a fact of poor interface design (which we'll discuss later) that PHP requires us to implement this method.

- The `close` method, like the `open` method, can also usually be disregarded. For most drivers, it is not needed.

- The `read` method should return the string version of the session data associated with the given `$sessionId`. There is no need to do any serialization or other encoding when retrieving or storing session data in your driver, as Laravel will perform the serialization for you.

- The `write` method should write the given `$data` string associated with the `$sessionId` to some persistent storage system, such as MongoDB, Dynamo, etc. Again, you should not perform any serialization - Laravel will have already handled that for you.

- The `destroy` method should remove the data associated with the `$sessionId` from persistent storage.

- The `gc` method should destroy all session data that is older than the given `$lifetime`, which is a UNIX timestamp. For self-expiring systems like Memcached and Redis, this method may be left empty.

</div>

<a name="registering-the-driver"></a>

Out of the box, Valet support includes, but is not limited to:

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- [Laravel](https://laravel.com)

- [Lumen](https://lumen.laravel.com)

- [Bedrock](https://roots.io/bedrock/)

- [Symfony](https://symfony.com)

- [WordPress](https://wordpress.org)

- [Zend](https://framework.zend.com)

</div>

However, you may extend Valet with your own [custom drivers](#custom-valet-drivers).

**Valet requires macOS and [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/). Before installation, you should make sure that no other programs such as Apache or Nginx are binding to your local machine's port 80.**

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- Install or update [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/) to the latest version using `brew update`.

- Install PHP 7.3 using Homebrew via `brew install php`.

- Install [Composer](https://getcomposer.org).

- Install Valet with Composer via `composer global require laravel/valet`. Make sure the `~/.composer/vendor/bin` directory is in your system's "PATH".

- Run the `valet install` command. This will configure and install Valet and DnsMasq, and register Valet's daemon to launch when your system starts.

</div>

Once Valet is installed, try pinging any `*.test` domain on your terminal using a command such as `ping foobar.test`. If Valet is installed correctly you should see this domain responding on `127.0.0.1`.

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- Create a new directory on your Mac by running something like `mkdir ~/Sites`. Next, `cd ~/Sites` and run `valet park`. This command will register your current working directory as a path that Valet should search for sites.

- Next, create a new Laravel site within this directory: `laravel new blog`.

- Open `http://blog.test` in your browser.

</div>

**That's all there is to it.** Now, any Laravel project you create within your "parked" directory will automatically be served using the `http://folder-name.test` convention.

The `link` command may also be used to serve your Laravel sites. This command is useful if you want to serve a single site in a directory and not the entire directory.

<div class="content-list" markdown="1">

- To use the command, navigate to one of your projects and run `valet link app-name` in your terminal. Valet will create a symbolic link in `~/.config/valet/Sites` which points to your current working directory.

- After running the `link` command, you can access the site in your browser at `http://app-name.test`.

</div>

To see a listing of all of your linked directories, run the `valet links` command. You may use `valet unlink app-name` to destroy the symbolic link.