Deploy laravel to VPS from scratch

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.

• Add a user
• Setup SSH
• Install PHP
• Install Composer
• Install Nginx
• Setup Git
• Set permissions
• Setup MySQL
• Setup Redis
• Setup Supervisor for Queues
• Setup Cron for Scheduled jobs
• SSL Certificate

Add a user

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

sudo adduser raviteja

usermod -aG sudo raviteja

Run commands as the new user with sudo permissions.

sudo su raviteja

• Video

Setup SSH

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

On the server, add the public key.

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

• Video

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 php8.0-fpm php8.0-cli php8.0-mysql \
  php8.0-mcrypt php8.0-gd php8.0-imap php8.0-curl \
  php8.0-mbstring php8.0-xml php8.0-bcmath php8.0-zip

• Video

Install Composer

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

Install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

Change nginx config

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

We should add ssl_certificate details in the config only after installing ssl certificate with certbot.

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

sudo nginx -t

sudo systemctl reload nginx

• Nginx setup in Laravel docs

Setup Git

cd /var

sudo mkdir repo && cd repo

sudo mkdir site.git && cd site.git

sudo git init --bare

After initiating the repo, you need to change the ownership for the current user

cd /var/repo

sudo chown -R raviteja site.git

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

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

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Set permissions

ps aux | grep php

cd /var/www/thelaravelappfolder

sudo chown -R www-data: storage bootstrap

Setup MySQL

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server 

sudo mysql_secure_installation

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.

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 --classic certbot

sudo certbot --nginx

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

More instructions on the official website.