Setting up Laravel Boost

Laravel Boost gives a coding agent context about a specific Laravel application: a built-in MCP server, prepared guidelines, and automatically installed agent skills. Setup happens entirely through Composer and Artisan, with no separate account or credentials.

Install the package

From the Laravel application's project directory:

composer require laravel/boost --dev

Boost installs as a pure development dependency and does not ship with the production environment.

Run the install wizard

php artisan boost:install

The interactive wizard asks which agents to support (for example Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot in VS Code, or Junie) and which features to enable: the MCP server, AI guidelines, and agent skills. Depending on your choices, the command creates files such as .mcp.json, CLAUDE.md, or AGENTS.md in the project.

Register the MCP server manually if needed

Claude Code support is usually detected automatically. If it isn't, run:

claude mcp add -s local -t stdio laravel-boost php artisan boost:mcp

Other clients register the same command (php with the argument artisan boost:mcp) through their own MCP configuration.

Keep Boost resources up to date

Guidelines and skills track the installed package versions. After a Composer update, it's worth running:

php artisan boost:update

To avoid forgetting, add the command to the post-update-cmd script in composer.json so it runs automatically after every composer update.

Review before production use

Because tools such as Database Query have direct access to the configured database connection, Boost should run only against a local development database. Before relying on it day to day, run a quick test by asking the agent a simple question, such as the application's installed Laravel and PHP versions — if it responds with the actual, correct values, the setup is working.