insidert

How to deploy Laravel application to a server

Step-by-step guide on deploying laravel application to a VPS.

First published on

This is a step-by-step guide to setup your Laravel application on Vultr or Digital Ocean or any other VPS with root access.

Selecting a server

First you need to select a server in one of the service providers. I deploy all my servers on Vultr. I have been using this service since 2017. Get 100$ as signup bonus on Vultr.

Or you can use DigitalOcean. Get 200$ as signup bonus on DigitalOcean.

Important: The signup bonus expires after 2 months from signup. Be careful with the resources you create with them. If you are not careful you will charged accordingly after the bonus duration.

This post is a collection of commands that helped me setup Laravel in a VPS. I have written this for myself to just copy and past the commands directly so that I don’t have to go to individual resources. Most of the resources are from serversforhackers.com by Chris Fidao.

Creating a server

After creating an account on Vultr or DigitalOcean, you should select a server size based on your needs and opt to install Ubuntu.

Please choose Ubuntu LTS version. If it is not LTS version, it will be hard to update our softwares - like PHP - in future.

Login to your server

After creating a server, you will be given the IP address and login credentails for root user.

You will need an ssh client to log into your newly created server. I use Windows Terminal app.

To login, do ssh root@192.168.0.1 from your terminal app.

Replace 192.168.0.1 with the IP address of your server.

Add a user

After logging in as root, add a new user and add to sudo group.

sudo adduser raviteja

usermod -aG sudo raviteja

From here on, run commands as the new user with sudo permissions.

sudo su raviteja

Setup SSH for the new user

On your local machine, you need to create public and private keys. Run the below command from your local terminal to create the keys. All the keys should be in .ssh folder

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -o -a 100 -t ed25519 -f id_some_identifier

Copy the public key

cat id_some_identifier.pub

On the server, add the public key. First we need to create the directly and then paste the key in authorized_keys file.

sudo su raviteja
mkdir ~/.ssh
cd ~/.ssh
nano authorized_keys

Install PHP

Installs the latest version if you have not added PPA package.

sudo apt-get install git curl wget zip unzip

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y php8.2-fpm php8.2-cli php8.2-mysql \
  php8.2-mcrypt php8.2-gd php8.2-imap php8.2-curl \
  php8.2-mbstring php8.2-xml php8.2-bcmath php8.2-zip

You can replace the version number if you are installing more latest versions.

Install Composer

php -r "readfile('http://getcomposer.org/installer');" | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/bin/ --filename=composer

Install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

Allow Nginx in firewall

sudo ufw app list

sudo ufw allow 'nginx full'

sudo ufw reload

Change nginx config

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Note: We should add ssl_certificate details in the config only after installing ssl certificate with certbot. You can also refer laravel docs to get the config details.

server {
  listen 80 default_server;

  server_name thedomain.in www.thedomain.in;
  return 301 https://thedomain.in$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl default_server;

  ssl_certificate      /etc/letsencrypt/live/<thedomain.in>/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key  /etc/letsencrypt/live/<thedomain.in>/privkey.pem;

  root /var/www/ourprojectfolder/public;

  index index.php;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
  }

  location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
  }

  location ~* (?:^|/)\. {
    deny all;
  }

  location ^~ /.well-known/acme-challenge/ {
    allow all;
  }
}

Test the configuration everytime you change the nginx configs.

sudo nginx -t

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Setup Git

It would be easy to push directly from your local machine. There are many other ways to push your code to the server. This will act as your starting point.

On your server:

cd /var

sudo mkdir repo && cd repo

sudo mkdir site.git && cd site.git

sudo git init --bare

Setup post-receive hoook

cd /var/repo/site.git/hooks

sudo nano post-receive

Add the contents to the post-recieve file

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree=/var/www/laravel --git-dir=/var/repo/site.git checkout -f

Change the permission

sudo chmod +x post-receive

Change the ownership for the current user

cd /var/repo

sudo chown -R raviteja site.git

On your local system, inside your Laravel project

git remote add production ssh://raviteja@example.com/var/repo/site.git

git push production master

If you are using main branch locally, do git push production main:master

Set permissions

ps aux | grep php

cd /var/www/thelaravelappfolder

sudo chown -R www-data:raviteja storage bootstrap

Setup MySQL

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server

create database yourdatabase

create user databaseclient@'localhost' identified by 'a-password';

grant all privileges on yourdatabase.* to databaseclient@'localhost';

Import/Export database

// Export
mysqldump -u databaseclient -p yourdatabase | gzip > the_database_file_name.sql.gz

// Import
gunzip < 20122020_b.sql.gz | mysql -u databaseclient -p yourdatabase

Setup Redis

sudo apt-get install redis-server

redis-cli ping

Setup Supervisor for Queues

Supervisor docs.

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Create new file laravel-worker.conf inside /etc/supervisor/conf.d directory.

[program:laravel-worker]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=php /var/www/thelaravelfolder/artisan queue:work redis --tries=1 --timeout=3600 --max-time=3600
autostart=true
autorestart=true
stopasgroup=true
killasgroup=true
user=raviteja
numprocs=8
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/home/raviteja/thelaravelfolder/worker.log
stopwaitsecs=3600

Make this directory /home/raviteja/thelaravelfolder/ for the log.

Start supervisor

sudo supervisorctl reread

sudo supervisorctl update

sudo supervisorctl start laravel-worker:*

sudo supervisorctl status

For timeout function to work on the queues, pcntl extension should be enabled.

php -i | grep pcntl

Setup Cron for Scheduled jobs

crontab -e

* * * * * cd /var/www/laravelfolder && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

SSL Certificate

sudo snap install core; sudo snap refresh core

sudo snap install --classic certbot

sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

// This command will edit the nginx configuration
sudo certbot --nginx

// I use this command so that the nginx configuration is not edited
sudo certbot certonly --nginx

// testing to renew
sudo certbot renew --dry-run

More instructions on the official website.

php artisan storage:link
#code
#how-to
#laravel
#server