How To Install Laravel on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of Laravel on your Ubuntu 16.04 server. For those of you who didn’t know, Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web application framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is a pretty new framework, but with a big potential to become one of the most popular PHP frameworks.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Laravel on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Laravel on Ubuntu 16.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install imagemagick php7.0-intl php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-mbstring php7.0-mysql php7.0-mcrypt

Step 3. Install Composer.

Install Composer which is the tool for dependency management in PHP:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php

In this tutorial, we will put the composer in our /usr/local/bin/ directory.  We will also rename the composer’s name from composer.phar to composer. To do that type the following command:

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Give execute permission to the composer:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Step 4. Installing Laravel.

Download the latest version of Laravel, Use the below command to clone master repo of Laravel from Github, At the moment of writing this article it is version 5:

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git

After then move to the Laravel code directory and use composer to install all dependencies required for the Laravel framework:

cd /var/www/laravel
composer install

This will take a while according to the network speed. After that set proper permissions on files:

chown -R www-data.www-data /var/www/laravel
chmod -R 755 /var/www/laravel
chmod -R 777 /var/www/laravel/app/storage

Now set the 32-bit long random number encryption key, which is used by the Illuminate encrypter service:

### php artisan key:generate

Application key [Lf54qKbi3mwe463qR4NtYywgf9JdRGDTN0oV9qI] set successfully

Now edit config/app.php configuration file and update the above-generated application key as follows. Also, make sure the cipher is set properly:

y' => env('APP_KEY', 'Lf54qKbi3mwe463qR4NtYywgf9JdRGDTN0oV9qI'),

'cipher' => 'AES-256-CBC',

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Laravel.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘laravel.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2ensite laravel.conf
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/laravel.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/laravel/public
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/laravel/public/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing Laravel.

Laravel will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com or http://server-ip-address and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Laravel. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Laravel in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Laravel website.

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