From local to Bitbucket to DigitalOcean

Did you run composer install after pulling code from repo? It's because vendor directory remains in .gitignore and you need to pull packages on remote server from composer.lock file.

A lot of things you maybe didnt do:

• Install php dependencies by running composer update
• Install front-end dependencies by running npm install
• Create a .env file that contains database info, app key, etc.
• Actually set up your server. artisan serve is ok for development (at least sometimes) but is not designed for production. You need to set your server up and make sure your url points to it.

It works now. Here are the steps.

1. Created project in my local machine.
2. Committed to Bitbucket.
3. Cloned the repo from Bitbucket in my remote server.
4. Renamed .env.example to .env (just make sure you have a .env file).
5. Generated key by running php artisan key:generate.
6. Ran composer install.
7. Ran composer update (I'm not sure if this is needed).
8. Ran php artisan serve --host=youripaddress --port=8000
9. Viewed in the browserhttp://yourIPAddress:8000

Question: @zachleigh - Can you please clearify your last statment?

• Actually set up your server. artisan serve is ok for development (at least sometimes) but is not designed for production. You need to set your server up and make sure your url points to it.

Are you saying that we shouldn't use artisan serve in our remote-servers period or you just advising that it is not meant to be a permanent solution to serve your page?

I know that for production sites in Nginx, you would need to create a server block, I did this once already (for practice purposes).

Thank you all for your help.

@fsdolphin As far as I know, artisan serve is simply a wrapper around the built in php server. You can read about it here. At the top of that page is this warning:

Warning
This web server was designed to aid application development. It may also be useful for testing purposes or for application demonstrations that are run in controlled environments. It is not intended to be a full-featured web server. It should not be used on a public network.

Dire. The built in server is singled threaded meaning that it can only do one thing at a time. So if you have more than one or two users on the site, its going to brick up pretty fast. So yeah, I wouldnt use this in production.

I also stopped using it in development because it does some things a little differently than a real server does (I dont know what) and that tended to make deployment a little more difficult than it should be. I seemed to always run into the 'but it works perfectly in development!' scenario which is really frustrating and makes zero-downtime deployment impossible.

The only time I use artisan serve these days is for showing or testing things out quickly. For any serious project, I develop in the exact same environment that I deploy on, for me that is currently Ubuntu 16.04 using Apache.

Thanks a lot for your help.