How to Install Laravel on Ubuntu 20.04

Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework. It is mainly used for building PHP-based web applications.

Laravel is suitable for both small-scale and enterprise-level application development. Its elegant syntax, advanced features, robust tools help simplify web application development. Laravel is highly scalable and has built-in support for distributed cache systems.

Step 1: Install Apache web server:

 sudo apt install apache2

Once installed, Apache should be running. If it's not, for whatever reason, start it:

sudo systemctl start apache2

Then enable it to start on boot time.

sudo systemctl enable apache2

To verify the status of Apache, execute:

 sudo systemctl status apache2

Step 2: Install PHP and additional PHP extensions:

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mbstring php-cli php-bcmath php-json php-xml php-zip php-pdo php-common php-tokenizer php-mysql

When the installation is complete, verify the PHP version.

php -v

Step 3: Create Database for Laravel Application:
But first, we need to install a database server. Laravel supported database systems are MariaDB, MySQL, SQLite, Postgres, or SQL Server.
We will go with the MariaDB database engine.

sudo apt install mariadb-server

Once the database server is installed, log into the MariaDB prompt:

sudo  mysql -u root -p

Once logged in create the database, database user, and grant all privileges to the database user.

CREATE DATABASE laravel_db;

CREATE USER 'laravel_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secretpassword';

GRANT ALL ON laravel_db.* TO 'laravel_user'@'localhost';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

QUIT;

Step 4: Install Composer:
Composer is a dependency package manager for PHP. It provides a framework for managing libraries and dependencies and required dependencies. To use Laravel, first install composer.

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

This downloads the composer.phar file.

Next, move the composer file to the /usr/local/bin path.

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

Assign execute permission:

sudo chmod +x   /usr/local/bin/composer

Verify the Composer version installed:

composer --version

Step 5: Install Laravel 8 on Ubuntu:
With Composer installed, the next course of action is to install Laravel.

Navigate to the webroot directory, type:

cd /var/www/html

Now, install Laravel using the composer command, type:

sudo composer create-project laravel/laravel laravelapp

The command creates a new directory called laravelapp and installs all the files and directories for Laravel.

Change the ownership of the Laravel directory to the webserver user and also the permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/laravelapp
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/laravelapp/storage

Feel free to replace laravelapp with a preferred directory name.

Once the installation is done navigate to the installation directory and check the Laravel version.

 cd laravelapp

php artisan

Step 6: Configure Apache to serve Laravel site:
Lastly, we need to set up the Apache webserver to host the Laravel site. For that to happen, we need to create a virtual host file

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.conf

Next, past the content shown and replace the example.com ServerName directive with the FQDN or public IP of the server ( Or private IP in case the server is on a LAN network ).

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/laravelapp/public
<Directory /var/www/html/laravelapp>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Save the changes and exit the file. Next, enable the Laravel site and Apache rewrite module using these two commands.

sudo a2ensite laravel.conf

sudo a2enmod rewrite

To apply the changes, restart Apache

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 7: Access Laravel from a browser:

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