Going from Laravel Sail (dev environment) + production environment

Transitioning from a Laravel Sail (development environment) to a production environment on a VPS can indeed be a bit challenging if you're not familiar with the process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through this transition:

1. Prepare Your VPS

First, ensure your VPS is set up with the necessary software. You will need:

• A web server (e.g., Nginx or Apache)
• PHP (compatible version with your Laravel application)
• A database server (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL)
• Composer
• Git (optional, but recommended for deployment)

2. Set Up Your Web Server

For this example, let's use Nginx. Here’s a basic Nginx configuration for a Laravel application:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com;
    root /var/www/your-laravel-app/public;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.php;

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

3. Deploy Your Application

You can deploy your application using Git. Here’s a simple way to do it:

1. Clone your repository:

   cd /var/www
   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/your-laravel-app.git
   cd your-laravel-app
   

2. Install dependencies:

   composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
   

3. Set up environment variables:

   cp .env.example .env
   nano .env
   

   Update the .env file with your production settings.

4. Generate application key:

   php artisan key:generate
   

5. Run migrations:

   php artisan migrate --force
   

6. Set permissions:

   chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/your-laravel-app
   chmod -R 775 /var/www/your-laravel-app/storage
   chmod -R 775 /var/www/your-laravel-app/bootstrap/cache
   

4. Configure Supervisor (for Queue Workers)

If your application uses queues, you’ll need to set up Supervisor to manage your queue workers.

1. Install Supervisor:

   sudo apt-get install supervisor
   

2. Create a Supervisor configuration file:

   sudo nano /etc/supervisor/conf.d/your-laravel-app-worker.conf
   

   Add the following content:

   [program:your-laravel-app-worker]
   process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
   command=php /var/www/your-laravel-app/artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3
   autostart=true
   autorestart=true
   user=www-data
   numprocs=1
   redirect_stderr=true
   stdout_logfile=/var/www/your-laravel-app/storage/logs/worker.log
   

3. Start Supervisor:

   sudo supervisorctl reread
   sudo supervisorctl update
   sudo supervisorctl start your-laravel-app-worker:*
   

5. Set Up SSL (Optional but recommended)

Use Certbot to obtain an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt:

sudo apt-get install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d yourdomain.com

6. Optimize Your Application

Run the following commands to optimize your Laravel application for production:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache

Conclusion

Using Laravel Sail for development is beneficial because it provides a consistent environment that mirrors production as closely as possible. However, for production, you typically want a more tailored setup that is optimized for performance and security. By following the steps above, you can transition from a Sail-based development environment to a robust production environment on a VPS.