Automate Laravel Application Deployment Across Multiple Servers and Databases Using Ansible

9 min readApr 11, 2024

This article will show you step by step guide on how to deploy a laravel application on multiple servers and database, using ansible.

The application is a simple VAT calculator.

enter amount to calculate and VAT percentage

Even though this is a laravel specific article. You can follow the steps for other applications as long as you understand the dependencies and requirements.

This is what we will be creating together.

I have used AWS for this. You can follow along with GCP or AZURE. Doesn’t matter.

We will host our application on our webservers with apache and expose them on port 80. Because we will be using more than one server. Users will access our application through a load balancer. We will also configure our application to access a database server for data storage.

Since we will be configuring multiple servers, ansible will be our configuration management tool.

Lets get started.

Before we create our resources, lets define and create the security groups.

let us create the security groups and attach them appropriately.

Load-balancer-SG will allow http on port 80 from anywhere

Ansible-server-SG will allow ssh on port 22 from my ip-address

Web-servers-SG will allow http on port 80 from the load balancer security group only

Web servers-SG will also allow ssh on port 22 from ansible security group

Db server-SG will allow TCP on port 3306 from web servers security group.

Now we can create the resources and attach the security groups appropriately.

I have created four servers. All running on Ubuntu linux.

I have also created an ansible user with sudo rights on the db and web servers.

Next, create our load balancer.

For this, we will create a target group, then register our web servers in this target group.

Once this is done, we will create a load balancer and configure it to route http requests to this target group.

Lets create a target group.

Next is to create the load balancer.

Our load balancer is active, so when our application is running, we can access it through the DNS.

Welldone on creating the needed resources.

Ensure no mistakes are made in creating and attaching these security groups.

Once this is done, we are all set to connect to our ansible server to:

Install ansible

Configure host file

Install packages and serve our application.

lets install ansible with the installation script:

#!/bin/bash
sudo apt update
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository --yes --update ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt install ansible –y

Configure host file.

I have configured the host file using the private-IP of web and db servers as well as the path to the connection key.

Here is what the host file looks like.

Install packages serve our application.

To achieve this, we will break our process to 3 parts.

- Install and set up db server

- Install and set up web server

- Application deployment

This will be the three roles in our ansible play-book.

Role1: install and set up db server.

Our task is to:

- Install MySQL server

- Create a database for our application

- Create a user to manage the database with

Allow remote connection into the MySQL server




---
- name: update cache
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    update_cache: yes
    state: latest

- name: install mysql server
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    name: mysql-server
    state: present
#This is a requirement for the host #https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.9/modules/mysql_user_module.html
- name: install PyMySQL for Python3.X on host
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    name: python3-pymysql
    state: present

- name: start mysql server
  ansible.builtin.service:
    name: mysql
    state: started
    enabled: yes

- name: create application database
  ansible.builtin.mysql_db:
    name: "{{ app_db }}"
    login_unix_socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
    state: present
    
- name: create app user & grant database privilege
  ansible.builtin.mysql_user:
    name: "{{ app_user }}"
    host: "%"
    password: "{{ app_password }}"
    priv: "{{ app_db }}.*:ALL"
    login_unix_socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
    state: present

- name: update mysql to listen on 0.0.0.0
  ansible.builtin.replace:
    path: /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf
    regexp: '^(bind-address|mysqlx-bind-address)\s*=\s*127\.0\.0\.1'
    replace: '\1 = 0.0.0.0'

  notify: restart mysql

Role2: Install and set up web server.

Since this is a laravel project, you can find the dependencies and server requirements here:

https://laravel.com/docs/11.x/deployment

For our tasks here:

- We will install apache2, php and git on the web servers

- Install php dependencies for the laravel application

- Configure apache2 to serve php contents

Serve web contents form laravel root folder (*/public)

---
- name: update cache
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    update_cache: yes
    state: latest

- name: add php repo 
  ansible.builtin.apt_repository:
    repo: 'ppa:ondrej/php'
    state: present


- name: update cache after adding repository
  ansible.builtin.apt:
    update_cache: yes
    state: latest

- name: install dependencies for laravel
  apt:
    name:
      - php8.2
      - php8.2-mysql
      - php8.2-intl
      - php8.2-curl
      - php8.2-mbstring
      - php8.2-xml
      - php8.2-zip
      - php8.2-ldap
      - php8.2-gd
      - php8.2-bz2
      - php8.2-sqlite3
      - php8.2-redis
      - php8.2-cli
      - php8.2-fpm
      - unzip
      - git
      - apache2
      - libapache2-mod-php8.2
    state: present

- name: enable Apache rewriting mode
  ansible.builtin.command: a2enmod rewrite
#The dir.conf contains the default order web files will load
#<IfModule mod_dir.c>
#        DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl  index.xhtml #index.htm
#</IfModule>

- name: replace apache dir.conf file
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    src: dir.conf
    dest: /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
    owner: root
    group: root
    mode: '0644'

- name: Change ownership of /etc/apache2/sites-available directory 
  ansible.builtin.file:
    path: /etc/apache2/sites-available/
    owner: ansible
    group: ansible
    recurse: yes


- name: change the root folder for laravel
  ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
    path: /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
    regexp: '^(\s*DocumentRoot\s+)(.*)$'
    line: 'DocumentRoot /var/www/count/public'

- name: Add <Directory> block to grant access to the files in */public
  ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
    path: /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
    insertafter: '^(\s*DocumentRoot\s+.*)$'
    line: |
          <Directory /var/www/count/public>
              Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
              AllowOverride All
              Require all granted
          </Directory>
  notify: restart apache2



- name: enable php module in apache
  ansible.builtin.command: a2enmod php8.2

Role3: Application deployment.

To deploy our application we will:

- Download composer

- Clone the repository for the application code

- Copy the environment variable file (.env) to the root directory

- Generate the application key for encryption

- Migrate our database schema

Populate database with initial data

---
- name: download composer
  ansible.builtin.get_url:
    url: "https://getcomposer.org/installer"
    dest: "/usr/bin/composer.php"

- name: run composer
  ansible.builtin.shell: "php /usr/bin/composer.php --install-dir=/usr/bin --filename=composer"
  
- name: cloning git repository
  ansible.builtin.git:
    repo: "{{ github_repo }}"
    dest: ~/count

- name: Copy the repository to /var/www
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    src: ~/count
    dest: /var/www
    remote_src: yes 


- name: Change owner of /var/www/count to ansible
  ansible.builtin.file:
    path: /var/www/count/
    owner: ubuntu
    group: ubuntu
    recurse: yes


- name: Run composer install in the count directory
  ansible.builtin.command:
    cmd: php /usr/bin/composer install --no-ansi --no-dev --no-interaction --no-progress --optimize-autoloader --no-scripts
    chdir: /var/www/count/

- name: copy .env file to app directory
  ansible.builtin.copy:
    src: ".env.j2"
    dest: "/var/www/count/.env"

- name: generate application key
  ansible.builtin.command: php artisan key:generate
  args:
    chdir: "/var/www/count/"


- name: Change owner of storage and cache directories
  ansible.builtin.file:
    path: "{{ item }}"
    owner: www-data
    recurse: yes
  loop:
    - "/var/www/count/storage"
    - "/var/www/count/bootstrap/cache"


- name: Migrate database schema
  ansible.builtin.command: php artisan migrate
  args:
    chdir: "/var/www/count/"

- name: Seed initial data
  ansible.builtin.command: php artisan db:seed
  args:
    chdir: "/var/www/count/"

last step here is to define how each tasks and roles will execute.

- name: setup db
  become: yes
  hosts: db
  roles: 
    - db_setup

- name: setup web
  become: yes
  hosts: web
  roles: 
    - web_setup
    - deploy_setup

With all tasks, roles and play define. This is the structure of my ansible playbook.

Now, lets run our playbook

The error shows ansible server could not connect to the db server.

Cause:

The db security group only currently allows TCP on port 3306 from web servers SG.

Solution:

edit inbound rule to allow ssh from ansible-SG

Now, lets try again.

Goodnews: All DB tasks ran successfully.

Badnews: our update cache task failed due to an unknown reason

After troubleshooting, I realized the servers were unable to download updates because I didn’t configure a way for them to connect to the internet. Since I only assigned private-IPs to them.

I will get into the details of how I resolved this in a different post.

For now, if you encounter this issue. You can relaunch the web-servers with a public-IP.

Lets try again.

Goodnews: all tasks ran

Badnews: theres one bad apple. Looks really bad.

Lets check it out.

fatal: [web2]: FAILED! => {"changed": true, "cmd": ["php", "artisan", "migrate"],
 "delta": "0:00:00.238743", "end": "2024-04-11 19:03:41.789734",
 "msg": "non-zero return code", "rc": 1, 
"start": "2024-04-11 19:03:41.550991", "stderr": "",
 "stderr_lines": [], "stdout": "\n   INFO  Preparing database.  \n\n  Creating migration table .............. 25ms FAIL\n\nIn Connection.php line 829:\n  
  \n  SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'migrations' 
 \nalready exists (Connection: mysql, SQL: create table `migrations` (`id` in  \n 
 t unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, `migration` varchar(255) no  \n  t null, `batch` int not null)
 default character set utf8mb4 collate 'utf8mb  \n  4_unicode_ci')                                                               \n                                                                              
 \n\nIn Connection.php line 587:\n   
\n  SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'migrations'  \n   
already exists \n  ", 
"stdout_lines": ["", "   INFO  Preparing database.  ", "", "  Creating migration table ......................................... 25ms FAIL", "", 
"In Connection.php line 829:", " ", "  SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050
 Table 'migrations'  ", "  already exists (Connection: mysql, SQL: create table `migrations` (`id` in  ", "  t unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, `migration` varchar(255) no  ", 
"  t null, `batch` int not null) default character set utf8mb4 collate 'utf8mb  ", "  4_unicode_ci')                                        
  ", " ", "", "In Connection.php line 587:", "     ", "  SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'migrations'  ", "   already exists  ", "                           
 "]}