Laravel 11 Deployment Guide: Launch a Laravel Web App in 43 Minutes [AVOID COMMON MISTAKES]
How to create a Laravel web app and deploy it to a live server in less than 45 minutes. Getting a basic version of our Laravel we app live as soon as possible will help us realise what is important and what is not when it comes to development. It also allows us to get new users and signups before our application is ready. This means that when we have actually built some functionality into our Laravel app, we can email our signed up users and let them know. This speeds up our progress and gives our app the best chance of success. It also helps to reduce the amount of time it takes to actually build out our product, as it keeps us more motivated. In this video I go from having literally nothing, to a live Laravel web app on a production server, in no time at all.
By following this step by step guide you will be left with your very own live Laravel web application. These are the steps we will be taking in this video:
Steps
1. Creating a new Laravel project on our local machine
2. Install Laravel Jetstream and InertiaJS
3. Create a local mysql database
4. Ensure Laravel web app is working correctly on our local machine
5. Initialise a git repository on our local machine
6. Add our Laravel code to our git repository
7. Create a remote git repository on github
8. Push our local git repository to our remote github repository
9. Create a new application on our server
10. Create an SSH key on our live server
11. Add SSH key (deploy key) to our github repository
12. Pull our github repository code into our live server
13. Add our live database configurations to our .env file
14. Install composer dependencies
15. Install NPM dependencies
16. Run database migrations
17. Link your domain to your live Laravel web app
18. Add an SSL certificate to your Laravel web app
I also go over a few "gotchas" and common mistakes as they come up. These include:
Gotchas / Common Mistakes
1. Using the correct version of php on your server. With Laravel 11 we need to use php version 8.3
2. Removing incorrect Laravel migration files from live server. For some reason our live server may have some outdated migrations left behind in our migrations folder. If we run our "php artisan migrate" with these files remaining, we will get errors. I will show you exactly which migrations these are so you can delete them.
3. Changing your .gitignore file to include the required files for deployment. By default our .gitignore file contains /public/build. This is fine if you run "npm run build" on your live server, but in this video I will show you how to remove this so that your build files are part of your git repository.
4. Installing correct composer dependencies. You might run into a the "In ProviderRepository.php line 206:
Class "Spatie\LaravelIgnition\IgnitionServiceProvider" not found" error when running artisan commands. If this happens it is because composer dependencies have not installed correctly. I'll show you how to resolve this.
Resources:
Laravel Installation
https://laravel.com/docs/11.x
Laravel Jetstream Installation
https://jetstream.laravel.com/install...
Github Commands
https://docs.github.com/en/migrations...
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