How to host a Laravel project on Gandi

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I host a lot of my projects on Gandi.net hosting, and when I started using the Laravel PHP web framework, it wasn’t obvious at first how to run a Laravel project on Gandi Simple Hosting. So let me describe the way I do it.

1. “Deploy with git” websites

• create a new hosted site on Gandi Simple Hosting (e.g. app.example.com)
• create a new Laravel project on your development machine via terminal
  laravel new app.example.com
• wait until the process is done and move into the new directory
  cd app.example.com
• create a symbolic link for htdocs (what Gandi uses for the website files) to public (what Laravel uses for website files)
  ln -s public htdocs
• initialize your git repo
  git init
• now set your remote repo to the Gandi URL
  git remote add gandi git+ssh://<yourid>@git.yyy.net/app.example.com.git
  (the exact URL is shown on your Gandi dashboard)

• add your code to git and do your first commit

git add .
git commit -a -m "first commit"

• now push your code to Gandi
  git push gandi master
• before you deploy for the first time: rename the old htdocs to htdocs_old, via regular SSH (first start the ‘emergency console’) or via the Gandi CLI (my preferred method)

gandi paas console [yourserver]
cd vhosts/app.example.com/
mv htdocs htdocs_old

• deploy your Laravel project for the first time
  ssh <yourid>@git.yyy.net deploy app.example.com.git
  (you will see that there is an automatic composer install phase)
• in the CLI you still have open, create the .env file and initialize it
  cp .env.example .env<br>php artisan key:generate
• edit the .env file to use the correct database, set the app to ‘prod’ etc
• open app.example.com in your browser
• Tada!

2. “Deploy with git” bash script

UPDATE: I upgraded this simple deploy script into a better gandi_deploy script: Easy site deployment on Gandi with git and gdeploy

To make re-deploying the project easier, I use a simple redeploy.sh bash script:

#!/bin/sh
   git commit -a \
&& git push gandi master \
&& ssh <yourid>@git.sd6.gpaas.net deploy app.example.com.git

Be sure to add your public key id_rsa.pub to the Gandi SSH key list, so you won’t have to give a password for the git push and ssh deploy step.

3. “Update via sFTP” websites

• create new hosted site on Gandi Simple Hosting (e.g. app.example.com)
• create a new Laravel project on your development machine via terminal
  laravel new app.example.com
• wait until the process is done and move into the new directory
  cd app.example.com
• create a symbolic link for htdocs (what Gandi uses for the website files) to public (what Laravel uses for website files)
  ln -s public htdocs
• initialize your git repo (not required here, but always a good idea)
  git init
• use your sFTP client (e.g. Filezilla) to login to your Gandi server sftp.yyy.net and browse to the folder vhosts/app.example.com/
• before you deploy for the first time: rename the old htdocs to htdocs_old via the FTP client (FileZilla)
• now upload the whole website to Gandi. You should see that the root folder contains the htdocs_old, the public folder and the htdocs symbolic link to it.
• in the CLI you still have open, create the .env file and initialize it
  cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate
• edit the .env file to use the correct database, set the app to ‘prod’ etc
• open app.example.com in your browser

Also check out the gandi-deploy / gdeploy.sh script for even easier deployment and administration