Setting Up AWS-EC2 For Laravel

7-Step guide to deploying your Laravel app on an EC2 instance.

In this post, I’ll go over the steps to prepare an EC2 instance for your Laravel app. I am assuming you had already set up the EC2 instance and launched it. You must also generate a key-pair and connect via SSH to your new EC2 instance. (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/getting-started/)

Use your SSH tool of choice and connect to your new EC2 instance.

1- Installing apache, php, mysql and mods

• sudo apt-get install apache2
• sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql (remember the mysql password set here)
• sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt
• sudo apt-get install php5 php-pear
• sudo apt-get install curl php5-curl php5-cli git
• sudo a2enmod rewrite
• sudo php5enmod mcrypt
• sudo service apache2 restart

2- Getting the project from your repository

• cd /var/www/html/
• sudo git clone [PROJECT REPO LINK]
• cd [PROJECT FOLDER]

3- Install & run composer

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

4- Create .env file & generating app key

• sudo cp .env.example .env
• sudo nano .env [Ctrl+O to save, Ctrl+x to exit](set config values)
• sudo php artisan key:generate

5- Configuring apache

• cd /etc/apache2/
• sudo nano apache2.conf
• Add to file[Ctrl+O to save, Ctrl+x to exit]:
  <Directory /var/www/html/[PROJECT FOLDER]/public>
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride all
  Require all granted
  </Directory>
• cd sites-enabled
• sudo nano 000-default.conf
• Add to file under <VirtualHost *:80>[Ctrl+O to save, Ctrl+x to exit]:
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/[PROJECT FOLDER]/public/
  ServerName [DOMAIN].[EXT]
  ServerAlias *.[DOMAIN].[EXT]
• sudo service apache2 restart

6- Creating a database

• cd
• mysql -u root -p (enter mysql password when prompted) (NB: for the sake of this example, i am using root user for mysql, however it is much safer to create a mysql user specific to your app.)
• create database [DATABASE NAME];[Ctrl+z when done]

7- Setting folder rights & running migrations

• cd /var/www/html/[PROJECT FOLDER]
• sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
• sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache
• php artisan migrate
• php artisan db:seed

By completing the above steps, you would have deployed your Laravel app on your new EC2 server.

In future posts I’ll go more in-depth regarding complex Elastic Beanstalk architectures for your Laravel solutions including setting up load balancers, connecting to an AWS-RDS server and other cool stuff.