Laravel versions have been changing very often. At the time of writing this article the current version is 5.5. The default command for creating a Laravel project laravel new projectName uses the latest version of Laravel. The need for creating a project using previous versions of Laravel becomes key especially when you do not want to upgrade other installations such as PHP 5.6.4to at least PHP 7.0 if you want to use Laravel 5.5. Changing the Laravel version in the composer.json file such as "laravel/framework": "5.4.*". and running composer update to install the required dependencies often gives errors. Here are commands that you can use to create different versions of Laravel 5 applications composer create-project laravel/laravel ProjectName version* Where version represent the required Laravel version 5.0., 5.1., 5.2., 5.3., 5.4., 5.5. Happy coding!.