In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, 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 the Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
- 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 useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install Laravel on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver
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 18.04 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 php7.1-cli php7.1-gd php7.1-opcache php7.1-mysql php7.1-json php7.1-mcrypt php7.1-xml php7.1-curl
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 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Download the latest version of Laravel, Use the below command to clone the 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 used by the Illuminate encrypter service:
### php artisan key:generate Application key [Lf54qKbi3mwe463qR4NtYywgf9JdRGramona9qI] set successfully
Now edit config/app.php configuration file and update the above-generated application key as follows. Also, make sure cipher is set properly:
y' => env('APP_KEY', 'Lf54qKbi3mwe463qR4NtYywgf9JdRGramona9qI'),
'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 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 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Laravel website.
