How to install Laravel on Ubuntu

Are you eager to harness the power of Laravel, one of the most popular PHP frameworks, on your Ubuntu-based server? Installing Laravel on your Ubuntu system is your first step towards building robust web applications with ease and efficiency. In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up Laravel on your Ubuntu environment, ensuring that you have all the tools and knowledge necessary to embark on your web development journey. Let's dive into the world of Laravel and Ubuntu, and unleash the potential of this dynamic combination.

1. Install curl if not already installed

sudo apt-get install curl

2. install composer if not already installed

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php — –install-dir=/usr/local/bin –filename=composer

3. Now run blow command to install laravel

composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1"

4. Add laravel to PATH to make it available everywhere

export PATH="~/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH"

5. Create your Laravel app

Now that Laravel is added to path, now all sudoers can create laravel apps using below command

laravel new app-name

if you are not a sudoer, above command will show below error

laravel: command not found

You can create a link in /usr/local/bin to solve this problem

sudo ln -s /root/.composer/vendor/bin/laravel /usr/local/bin/laravel

Now non sudoers can create laravel apps like

sudo laravel new app-name

6.Install mod_rewrite if not already installed

 sudo a2enmod rewrite
 service apache2 restart
 

You can confirm if its enabled using below command

sudo apache2ctl -M

if you created your app inside web server root directory (/var/www/html/) then you can access it like

http://localhost/app-name/public

Creating VHOST for Laravel application

1. Create vhost file

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/app-name.com.conf

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/app-name.com.conf

The file will look something like this (I’ve removed the comments here to make the file more approachable):

 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/html ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost> 

First, we need to change the ServerAdmin directive to an email that the site administrator can receive emails through.

ServerAdmin admin@app-name.com

Then ServerName and ServerAlias

 ServerName app-name.com ServerAlias www.app-name.com 

The only other thing we need to change for a basic virtual host file is the location of the document root for this domain. We already created the directory we need, so we just need to alter the DocumentRoot directive to reflect the directory we created:

DocumentRoot /var/www/app-name

In total, our virtualhost file should look like this:

 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@app-name.com ServerName app-name.com ServerAlias www.app-name.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/app-name/public ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost> 

save and close the file.

2. Enable the Virtual Host File

sudo a2ensite app-name.com.conf

When you are finished, you need to restart Apache to make these changes take effect:

sudo service apache2 restart

3. Set Up Local Hosts File (Optional)

sudo nano /etc/hosts

hosts file will look something like this

 127.0.0.1 localhost 111.111.111.111 app-name.com 

For the domain that I used in this guide, assuming that my VPS IP address is 111.111.111.111, if you are creating vhost locally, you can replace 111.111.111.111 with 127.0.0.1

Now that you have your virtual hosts configured, you can test your laravel app easily by going to the domain that you configured in your web browser:

http://app-name.com