How to Deploy Laravel Project to Live Nginx Server

John on October 07, 2021

In this tutorial, we will learn how to deploy a Laravel application to a live Nginx server. It assumes you already have Ngnix installed and configured.

Step 1 Create Directory for App & Upload Files

The first step is to create a directory for your Laravel app inside the /var/www directory. Replace example.com with your domain.

sudo mkdir /var/www/example.com

Now (as none root) take ownership and group permissions for this file.

sudo chown your_username -R /var/www/example.com/

sudo chgrp your_username -R /var/www/example.com/

Now upload your files to the /var/www/example.com directory using scp (ADD_LINK).

The SCP command will be something like:

scp -r * your_username@server_ip:/var/www/example.com/

Set File Permissions

cd into the app root and set the storage and bootstrap/cache directories to have these permissions for www-data:

sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache

sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache

Create an Nginx Config File

The next step is to create an Nginx config file for the app in the /etc/nginx/sites-available directory.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Add the following contents, replacing example:

Note – you might need to comment out the ssl lines if you have not created an SSL Certificate yet.

server {
       listen 80;
       listen [::]:80;

       server_name example.com www.example.com;
       return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen 443 ssl http2;
       listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

       include snippets/ssl-example.com.conf;
       include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

       root /var/www/html/quickstart/public;

       index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

       server_name example.com www.example.com;

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

       location ~ \.php$ {
               include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
               fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
       }

       location ~ /\.ht {
               deny all;
       }

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

Create SymLink to Sites Enabled

Now, create a symbolic link for the new config file in /etc/nginx/sites/enabled:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Test the nginx configuration

sudo nginx -t

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Create MySQL Database, User and Grant Permissions

Begin by logging into the mysql server, suppling the mysql root password when required:

mysql -u root -p

Now create a database with the following command, replacing exampledb with the name of the database to create:

CREATE DATABASE exampledb DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Now create a new MySQL user with the following command, replacing newuser and user_password:

CREATE USER 'newuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'user_password';

Next, grant all privileges for the new user to the new database:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO 'database_user'@'localhost';

Add DB Credientials to the .env File

Now, open the .env file for your app and add the credentials for the database you just created like this:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=exampledb
DB_USERNAME=newuser
DB_PASSWORD=user_password

Conclusion

You will also need to change the Laravel public path if you are using a directory other than public_html to serve public files.