🌱 Gather: Intentional Living App Development

28 August 2025
Kai
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Categories: Web Development

Gather is a community-matching platform designed to help people, families, and groups come together to live more intentionally. Unlike dating apps that focus on romance, Gather connects individuals through shared values, skills, and life intentions — making it easier to form co-housing projects, land trusts, and supportive communities.

With Gather, users can:

  • Create rich profiles (individuals, families, or groups).
  • List their skills, needs, and intentions for intentional living.
  • Match with others who share similar visions for sustainable and communal life.
  • Collaborate on co-buying land, building eco-villages, or simply living in neighborhoods with shared purpose.

The mission of Gather is simple: help people find each other, build community, and co-create a better future — together. 🌍✨

Introduction

In this article, we’ll walk through the first steps of building Gather, an intentional living app designed to help people and families connect for co-housing, sustainable living, and community projects.

But more than the app idea itself, this tutorial is about setting up a modern development environment using:

  • Laravel for the backend (API-driven).
  • React (web-first) for the frontend.
  • GitHub for version control and collaboration.
  • Laragon + VS Code for local development.

If you’re new to Laravel or React, don’t worry — we’ll go step by step.


1. The Project Idea: Gather

Gather is like a matchmaking platform, but instead of dating, the goal is to find people to live and grow with intentionally. Users create profiles, list skills and intentions, and match with others to form communities.

This makes it a great demo project to learn modern web development because it requires:

  • Authentication
  • Profile creation
  • Matching logic
  • API communication
  • A clean frontend

2. Setting Up the Development Environment

Install the essentials

  • VS Code → main IDE.
  • Laragon → lightweight PHP, MySQL, Apache stack.
  • Composer → PHP dependency manager.
  • Node.js (LTS) → required for React and frontend tools.
  • Git → version control.

Before we can start building Gather, we need to set up our development environment.

1. Install VS Code (Editor)

Download: https://code.visualstudio.com/download

  • Choose your OS (Windows, macOS, Linux).
  • Run the installer → click Next through defaults.
  • Launch VS Code.

👉 Recommended Extensions for later:

ES7+ React/Redux/React-Native snippets

PHP Intelephense

Laravel Blade Snippets

Prettier – Code formatter

2. Install Laragon (Local Server)

Download: https://laragon.org/download/

  • Get Laragon Full (includes Apache, PHP, MySQL).
  • Install it (default path is fine).
  • Start Laragon → you’ll see options to run Apache, MySQL.

👉 Test: open browser and visit http://localhost → Laragon should show its welcome page.

3. Install Composer (PHP Dependency Manager)

Download: https://getcomposer.org/download/

Verify installation: composer -V

Windows: download the Composer-Setup.exe and run installer.

macOS/Linux: run this in terminal: 

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Verify installation:

composer -V

4. Install Node.js (LTS)

Download: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

  • Choose LTS version (stable).
  • Run installer → leave defaults.
  • Verify installation: node -v npm -v

👉 npm (Node Package Manager) comes bundled with Node.js.

5. Install Git (Version Control)

Download: https://git-scm.com/downloads

  • Choose your OS.
  • Run installer → leave defaults (especially “Add Git to PATH”).
  • Verify installation: git --version

👉 If you don’t have a GitHub account, create one: https://github.com/join
Once installed, open a terminal (CMD, Git Bash, or VS Code terminal) and run:

php -v       # should show PHP version
composer -V  # should show Composer version
node -v      # should show Node version
npm -v       # should show npm version
git --version # should show Git version

If all return versions → 🎉 your environment is ready!

⚡ Next Step: we’ll create our first Laravel project (backend) and first React project (frontend) inside GitHub repos.

Please continue second page after installations and environment pages are done!