README

Oxygen Installer downloads Laravel, installs Oxygen, and prepares the project so you can start from a working Oxygen application instead of wiring the stack together by hand.

Version Compatibility

See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

Requirements

• PHP ^8.3
• Composer
• Git
• Node.js and NPM, unless you use --no-npm

Getting Started

Installation / Update

Install the latest Oxygen Installer globally with Composer:

composer global require emedia/oxygen-installer

The current release is 5.0.0.

Make sure Composer's global vendor bin directory is on your $PATH. Common locations are:

macOS: $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin
Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Composer\vendor\bin
GNU / Linux Distributions: $HOME/.config/composer/vendor/bin or $HOME/.composer/vendor/bin

You can also find Composer's global installation path by running composer global about and checking the first line.

After installation, confirm the version:

oxygen -v

Create a Project

The default install path on 5.x is Laravel 13 with Oxygen 9:

oxygen new myproject

You can also provide common project settings in one command:

oxygen new myproject --name "My Project" --dev_url "localhost.test" --dbname mydatabase --dbuser john --dbpass mypassword --mailuser smtp_username --mailpass smtp_password

Change Oxygen / Laravel Version

Use --o_version when you need an older compatible Oxygen release:

# Install Laravel 13 + Oxygen 9 (default)
oxygen new myproject

# Install Laravel 12 + Oxygen 8
oxygen new myproject --o_version 8

# Install Laravel 10 + Oxygen 7
oxygen new myproject --o_version 7

# Install the dev branch
oxygen new myproject --o_version dev

Frontend Build Behavior

• For Oxygen 8, Oxygen 9, and newer dev builds, the installer runs npm install and a single npm run dev.
• Oxygen 7 keeps the previous double npm run dev behavior.
• --no-npm skips Node.js and NPM checks entirely, and also skips all frontend install/build steps.

Available Options

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for developer instructions.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2026 Elegant Media.