Basic Forge help / Workflow request

Hello,

I have some questions, most of them being very basics as I'm quite new Laravel.

The end result that I'm trying to achieve is this :

www.mydomain.com --> one forge site

sub1.mydomain.com --> another forge site

sub2.mydomain.com --> ...

All of them being on the same DigitalOcean server.

I'm now switching from Heroku to DigitalOcean / Forge, and I am a bit lost. I followed the Laracast first videos and so far, I have a working server (it says it's active) with an public IP address and a private IP address for the site I created. According to the log my migrations went well, I can connect and see my database with Sequel Pro, and when I'm connected with SSH I can see that my files are on the server.

Now, questions time :

1 - How can I see the website ? =) for the moment, I don't want to link it with my personal domain name, I just wanted to type the public IP address and I expected to see something, but instead I only have a 404 Error : http://46.101.181.41. Is it possible to do what I had in mind ? Am I doing something wrong/stupid ? Do I have to go and create a "A" DNS link on my provider to see the website ?

2 - When I create the site on forge, I am asked to give a domain name, what's the influence of this ? should i give the real domain : sub1.mydomain.com ? or is it just an internal reference where I can only put sub1 for instance ?

3 - Now a workflow question ... In my AuthServiceProvider, I have these lines for my ACL :

        foreach($this->getPermissions() as $permission) {
            $gate->define($permission->name, function($user) use ($permission) {
                return $user->hasRole($permission->roles);
            });
        }

If I run a migration with these lines, I will receive an error telling me that the permissions table cannot be created. So whenever I change my migrations files, I comment these lines, commit, push, run the migration (or deploy on forge), then uncomment, re-commit, re-push and re-run the deployment. With this workflow, everything works, but I am sure there must be a smarter way to do this ... any hint from your side ?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Jerem