Plan and Install

The site map

Atlas Training has a home page, a course catalogue, a page per course with its dated sessions, instructors, studios, news and a few plain pages. In Lynx each of those is a page in one tree, and each page uses a template that says which fields it has:

/                              home
├── courses/                   courses (the catalogue)
│   └── yoga-teacher-training/ course
│       └── 2026-11-02-lisbon/ session (one dated run, which people book)
├── instructors/               instructors
│   └── ana-ribeiro/           instructor
├── locations/                 locations
│   └── lisbon/                location
├── posts/                     posts (news)
├── about/                     page
└── privacy/                   page

Every page also has a Portuguese URL, such as /pt/cursos/formacao-professores-yoga, which editors set in the admin.

Create the app

composer create-project laravel/laravel atlas
cd atlas

Require Lynx and the modules the site uses:

composer require lynxcms/core lynxcms/admin lynxcms/menus lynxcms/media \
    lynxcms/forms lynxcms/seo lynxcms/sitemap lynxcms/cache lynxcms/mcp

Package	Gives Atlas
lynxcms/core	Pages, templates, fields, languages, selectors, actions.
lynxcms/admin	The admin at /lynx, for the school's staff.
lynxcms/menus	The main and footer menus, edited in the admin.
lynxcms/media	Photos of courses, instructors and studios.
lynxcms/forms	Enquiries, newsletter sign-ups and surveys (chapters 6 and 9).
lynxcms/seo, lynxcms/sitemap	Search titles, structured data and the sitemap (chapter 5).
lynxcms/cache	The page cache that makes the site fast (chapter 10).
lynxcms/mcp	MCP tools so the owner's AI assistant can work with the site (chapter 10).

Composer lists the packages with database changes waiting. Run the migrations, then install Lynx:

php artisan migrate
php artisan lynx:install

lynx:install creates the default language, the home page and three roles: superuser, editor and guest, then asks for the owner's name, email and password and creates their account as superuser. In chapter 8 customers sign up too, and each new account gets the guest role, which sees the website and never the admin. See People who sign up.

Hand the home page to Lynx

Lynx serves every URL your routes leave free, but Laravel starts with a welcome route at /. Empty routes/web.php:

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use App\Http\Controllers\AccountController;
use App\Http\Controllers\BookingController;
use App\Http\Controllers\StripeWebhookController;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\ValidateCsrfToken;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

/*
 * Lynx serves every URL these routes leave free, the home page included, so the welcome route
 * Laravel starts with is gone. These are the app's own routes.
 */

// #region bookings
Route::post('/book/{session}', [BookingController::class, 'store'])
    ->whereNumber('session')->middleware('throttle:10,1')->name('bookings.store');
Route::get('/bookings/{uuid}', [BookingController::class, 'show'])
    ->whereUuid('uuid')->name('bookings.show');

// Stripe signs its webhooks instead of sending a CSRF token
Route::post('/stripe/webhook', StripeWebhookController::class)
    ->withoutMiddleware(ValidateCsrfToken::class)->name('stripe.webhook');
// #endregion bookings

// #region account
Route::get('/account', AccountController::class)->middleware('auth')->name('account');
// #endregion account

Sign in at /lynx and you see the page tree with the home page. Visit / and Lynx renders it with its default view, a list of its fields, until chapter 3 writes the real one.

What you get

• The client: an admin they can sign in to now, with roles ready for their staff.
• You: a plain Laravel app. Lynx is packages and an action layer, so everything you know about Laravel still applies.