If you have not yet set up your Laravel project on an Xampp stack, please go here https://wecode101.com/xampp-development-environment-for-laravel-8.
Step 1 Start up the xampp serve
Launch your control panel and click start on Apache and MySQL modules
Step 2. create database in phpMyAdmin
Once Apache and MySql as started successfully open a browser such as chrome, copy and paste the url "http://localhost/dashboard/" then click on the phpMyAdmin tab. You should see the phpMyAdmin panel, click on the database tab in order to create a new database.
Step 3. Configure .env file to connect with Xampp database.
Go to your .env file located at the root of your project and edit the database section as below:
Change the thexamppdatabasename to whatever you called the database in step 2.
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=thexamppdatabasename
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=