Clean Install of Laravel using Code Bright Basic Routing Example Not Routing - php

Question

I've just as of right now started to learn Laravel and Composer and I've been following the Basic Routing example I found in Code Bright. I've cloned the Laravel repo, and installed it using Composer as mentioned in the previous Installation section of Code Bright, and am using the Apache config suggested, which is fairly similar to what I would normally use in my other apps using XAMPP, but when I enter in the url to see the route output I get "Whoops, looks like something went wrong".
Step 1
git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git laravel
Step 2
composer install
Step 3
<VirtualHost *:80>
# Host that will serve this project.
ServerName laravel.dev
ServerAlias laravel.dev
# The location of our projects public directory.
DocumentRoot "D:/htdocs/laravel/public"
# Useful logs for debug.
ErrorLog "logs/laravel.dev-error.log"
CustomLog "logs/laravel-access.log" common
# Rewrites for pretty URLs, better not to rely on .htaccess.
<Directory "D:/htdocs/laravel/public">
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Step 4
Route::get( 'my/page', function() {
return 'Hello World!';
});
Step 5
http://laravel.dev/my/page
I'm running off of Windows, with PHP version 5.5.11 via XAMPP, most recent Composer is installed via Windows installer so on PATH, and Laravel is installed globally.

Answer 1

Got it! I had to turn on debug in app/config/app.php, which popped up the issue in an amazingly descriptive debug screen, and then run key generate since the error was the absence of the encryption key
php artisan key:generate