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Introduction

Laravel is a powerful PHP web framework known for its elegant syntax and developer-friendly features. In this article, we’ll guide you through deploying a Laravel application to Valyent.

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Prerequisites

  • A UNIX-like system (see WSL if you are using Windows) for using the Valyent CLI.
  • A Valyent account, with a registered payment method (sign up here).
  • PHP, Composer, NodeJS, and NPM installed on your machine.

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Installing the Valyent CLI

curl -L https://cli.valyent.cloud/install.sh | sh

Inspect the installation script here and the GitHub repository.

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Authenticating

valyent auth login

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Initializing the Laravel project

If you don’t have a Laravel project yet, create one using Composer:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel <app-name>

Now, change your directory to the newly created Laravel application:

cd <app-name>

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Initializing the project for Valyent

Note that Laravel applications may require at least 512MB of RAM to run.

Initialize the valyent.toml configuration file to link your local codebase to a Valyent application:

valyent init

This command will prompt you to select or create a project and an associated application.

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Adding the Dockerfile

Create a Dockerfile to enable Valyent to build a Docker image for your Laravel application:

touch Dockerfile

Fill it with the following content:

# Use the webdevops PHP with Nginx base image version 8.3 on Alpine Linux
FROM webdevops/php-nginx:8.3-alpine

# Install required dependencies for Docker to function
RUN apk add oniguruma-dev libxml2-dev

# Install necessary PHP extensions
RUN docker-php-ext-install \
        bcmath \
        ctype \
        fileinfo \
        mbstring \
        pdo_mysql \
        xml

# Copy Composer binary from the official Composer image
COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

# Install NodeJS and npm
RUN apk add nodejs npm

# Set the document root for the web server
ENV WEB_DOCUMENT_ROOT /app/public

# Set the application environment to production
ENV APP_ENV production

# Set the working directory to /app
WORKDIR /app

# Copy the application code into the container
COPY . .

# Copy the .env.example file and rename it to .env
# You can modify the .env.example to configure your site for production
RUN cp -n .env.example .env

# Install and configure your site for production
# https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/deployment#optimizing-configuration-loading
RUN composer install --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader --no-dev

# Generate security key
RUN php artisan key:generate

# Optimize Configuration loading
RUN php artisan config:cache

# Optimize Route loading
RUN php artisan route:cache

# Optimize View loading
RUN php artisan view:cache

# Compile Breeze assets (or your site's assets)
RUN npm install
RUN npm run build

# Set ownership of files to the 'application' user
RUN chown -R application:application .

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Adding the .dockerignore file

Create a .dockerignore file to exclude unnecessary files from the Docker image:

touch .dockerignore

Fill it with the following content:

.git
.gitignore
node_modules
vendor
.env
.env.example

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Deploy the project

We are now ready to deploy the Laravel application to Valyent.

There is a few environment variables that need to be set before we can deploy the application.

Expose the application’s port by setting up the PORT environment variable:

valyent env set PORT=80

Now, deploy the Laravel application:

valyent deploy

Once the deployment is complete, run:

valyent open

to view your Laravel application in your browser.

Please note that this guide assumes a standard Laravel setup. Adjustments may be needed based on your specific Laravel project structure or additional requirements.

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