Setting up Laravel

diginized

I see in the forum posts that at least one user has attempted to setup a Laravel application (@saebel) but I don't see any documentation about it other than in the OpalStack announcement when Symlinks were introduced. Are there particular instructions that are recommended for setting up a Laravel application? I know it required a little trickery when I did it with Webfaction and I had a specific set of steps saved in a Google Doc that I always had to follow when setting one up. I wasn't sure what that process might look like here. I'll be playing around and trying to figure it out, but I thought I'd ask in case anyone has cracked that code already.

Thanks,
@diginized

sean

Put your Laravel project outside of apps in your home directory and then use a symlink app to point to the public directory.

The complete procedure is here in our docs: Example: serving a Laravel project with a symlink app

diginized

Thanks @sean , I think I have most of the steps figured out. I'm trying to list them below for others that come after, including myself, as a "tutorial" (more or less). Happy to accept any corrections or improvements that you or others can see to improve these steps.

Create a Database for the laravel application (https://help.opalstack.com/article/51/managing-databases)
The default database user has the same name as the database, which you can see at https://my.opalstack.com/notices/ listed as username@opal1.opalstack.com, but to log into the database you only use the part before the @.
Get the default password from https://my.opalstack.com/notices/
Change the default password if you want to:
mysql -u DBUSERNAME -p
SET PASSWORD FOR 'username'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('newpassword');
Upload the laravel project to a new folder within the home directory:
mkdir ~/laravel_project
cd laravel_project
git clone git@gitlab.com:GITLABUSERNAME/LARAVEL_PROJECT.git . (change this to your own git repo info or upload your project over SFTP)
Create a symlink Application (https://help.opalstack.com/article/135/example-serving-a-laravel-project-with-a-symlink-app) in the Opalstack admin page of type PHP+Apache (Symbolic Link) .... this should point to: /home/USERNAME/NAME_OF_APP_CREATED_ABOVE/public/ (ex: laravel_1_public)
Create Site Route (https://help.opalstack.com/article/52/managing-sites#adding-sites) that points to the symbolic link app (this is where you want to set your SSL certificate, such as LetsEncrypt)
If you haven’t already installed composer for your Opalstack account, you must do this before proceeding: https://help.opalstack.com/article/131/installing-composer
cd into the root folder of your laravel project
Copy the .env.example file to .env (or copy one from another laravel project that’s similar) and edit the settings in it to match this project. At a minimum you need to update the database settings.

Run the composer commands to setup your laravel project

composer update 
php artisan key:generate 
php artisan migrate

php artisan storage:link (optional)

saebel

More later, but I would recommend having a "laravel" folder at the root directory, and then your actual instance of laravel in a folder under that (such as "websiteA"), that way if you end up with multiple laravel installs, they are all in the same "laravel" parent directory.

Parthian

Hijacking this thread slightly.
I'm totally new to Laravel. Normally use Vue/Nuxt/Django/MODx. Wee bit of PHP for scripts.
I'm taking over a nearly complete Laravel project from a Developer who is ill.
Trying to get it running on Opalstack.
The project is the usual madness of 25,000 files, 150Mb starting at an app folder, node_modules, public, vendor etc. with composer,json and .env in the root.

So, when article/135 referenced above states "Upload your Laravel project into your shell user's home directory. " does that mean the whole 25000 files or does it mean the public folder. I think I'm being influenced by a Nuxt /dist folder where everthing is built into javascript.

And so, do I develop/build on my local machine or do I develop/build inside the opalstack folder?

And anyone any tips on a get started guide. I've got Sitepoint Premium but their Laravel videos are 4 years old...
I've seen two very different approaches.
https://www.wikihow.com/Install-Laravel-Framework-in-Windows and
https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/installation#getting-started-on-windows with Docker. WSL2. Sails

Very different. And I'd rather avoid WSL2 etc for now until I'm sure I want to use Laravel or not. Hence a preference to somehow develop on Opalstack if that's even possible.

Ta.

sean

Parthian So, when article/135 referenced above states "Upload your Laravel project into your shell user's home directory. " does that mean the whole 25000 files or does it mean the public folder.

It means the whole 25000 files, ie the parent directory of the public directory. In the article this is /home/myuser/mysite.

You can do your development directly on your Opalstack server. You'll probably need to install composer in your shell user directory at some point, instructions are at: Installing Composer

diginized

Parthian And anyone any tips on a get started guide. I've got Sitepoint Premium but their Laravel videos are 4 years old...

I'm 2 years late on the reply, but since I did just stumble on this question I'll leave a marker here for any future readers. When it comes to learning Laravel and its best practices, I found https://laracasts.com/ and it's community discussions to be an amazing resource.

Parthian

sean Smashing. Managed to get the simpler approach to Laravel installed locally. Avoiding the WSL2 thing - which looked kind of horrendous. And for anyone else reading I've found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zckH4xalOns Laravel tutorial. Seems decent.

turpialdev

Hello:

First of all, thank you for the help. With this explanation, pretty straight forward to deploy a Laravel app.

Now, I have a question: since the project folder is located in the user root directory, does the public folder inside it need some kind of permissions set up? I ask this because I can't access static files that are there.

sean

turpialdev

the public subdirectory and its subdirectories should have execute permission for "other", I usually use 711 as the mode.
files under those directories should have read permission for "other", I usually use 644.

You can set them with the following commands:

find ~/path/to/your/public -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 711
find ~/path/to/your/public -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

Hope this helps 🙂

turpialdev

Sean:

Thank you. Most helpful and correct.