Setting Up a Laravel Application on a VPS

Prerequisites

Laravel requires PHP 8.1+, Composer, a web server (Nginx recommended), and a database (MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL).

Install Dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y php8.2-fpm php8.2-mysql php8.2-mbstring php8.2-xml \
  php8.2-curl php8.2-zip php8.2-bcmath php8.2-redis nginx mariadb-server

# Install Composer
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Deploy Your App

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/you/mylaravel.git
cd mylaravel
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

Configure Environment

Edit .env:

APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_URL=https://example.com

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_DATABASE=myapp
DB_USERNAME=myapp_user
DB_PASSWORD=secure_password

Nginx Configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /var/www/mylaravel/public;
    index index.php;

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

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known) {
        deny all;
    }
}

Permissions and Optimization

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data storage bootstrap/cache
php artisan migrate --force
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache