Developing and/or deploying laravel on 1and1.com shared hosting

Hi there. I hope this might be helpful to others if I can work out the remaining issues, but I have run into a roadblock and am wondering which way to go from here if I can't unblock it.

I use a developer hosting account (Linux) at 1and1.com for several domains and websites. Since everything I do is very low traffic volume and non-commercial, I just use the same account for the development and deployment. I have SSH access and dedicated httpd.conf and plenty of capacity for domains, subdomains, traffic, space, etc. I also enjoy understanding the server back-end of anything I'm using, so when I decided to learn Laravel, I used this environment. Of course there were immediately problems with dependencies:

• multiple PHP versions installed (4, 5, 6, & 7) with 4.x being the default in the shell (i.e. /usr/bin/php= PHP 4.4.9)
• composer not installed
• NodeJS not installed
• mod rewrite enabled but not working correctly initially

The PHP versions are not an issue for websites because the 1and1 control panel lets you set which PHP version you will use for each website. But it does present a problem for doing things at the terminal. I installed composer locally and after quite a few different arrangements for getting the correct PHP version, finally ended up with a working composer. This required copying /usr/bin/php5.5-cli to ~/.composer/vendor/bin/php and inserting that directory into the path at the front so that it was the first instance found. This required adding .profile and .bashrc files to my account to set the $PATH mod because they are not there by default. I initially tried using an alias and then symlinks, but neither of those will work for the embedded calls to PHP after composer is launched initially.

I followed some pointers on this forum for modifying the mod_rewrite configuration, but in the end I believe the only change needed was because I had placed laravel under a sub-directory of my web root, so I needed to add "RewriteBase /subdir" to the .htaccess file in the root of the laravel public files.

I was going along fine until the Laracast that asked me to install NodeJS. I installed it locally as well and added its bin directory to my path also. But when I ran "npm install," after quite a lot of downloads, it runs out of memory. I believe it is near the end of the process, but I can't really continue with the lessons at this point because "gulp" is not found. I tried running "node node_modules/gulp/bin/gulp.js" assuming that that's what "gulp" would have done but it fails as well. I fear I won't be able to overcome a memory constraint without modifying Node itself. That's a bit too far in my book for patching this together. I prefer to use downloads unmodified and only change my environment.

At this point, I think I'd rather spend more time learning laravel and less time fixing dependencies. For development I can obviously use Homestead or my own VM or Baremetal machine locally in my development environment or I could use a hosting site that already supports laravel. Which one I choose might depend on how I'm going to have to eventually deploy the app I want to build with it. I do expect high traffic volume (I hope) on this app and will eventually want redundancy and quick rebuild options, so a cloud option would make sense.

If I want to at least temporarily use my current 1and1 environment for deployment (or if someone else wants to) would that be possible? Will I need to resolve the NodeJS/Gulp problem for deployment of a finished app? Or am I at a point where roadblocks are only going to affect development?

If I am aiming for a cloud deployment, which development option makes the most sense, if it matters at all?

If you made it this far, thank you. If you have any input, thank you even more.