Laravel 13 requires PHP 8.3 or newer. The Laravel 13 support matrix lists PHP 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5 as supported versions, so a production environment should use a currently supported PHP release and keep it patched.

Composer is required to install and manage the framework and PHP dependencies. The selected database driver must be available for the database in use, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or SQL Server. For a typical full-stack installation, Node.js with NPM or Bun is needed to compile frontend assets with Vite. Exact PHP extensions and infrastructure requirements depend on the services used by the application.