Deployment in a shared hosting setup

I wouldn't consider FTP hard.

I think you will need to prepare everything locally and ftp everything up (vendor, compiled files, cache etc).

Consider trying to convince your client that the debugging time on shared hosting will be higher and thereby could be costly in the long run

I have already offered to set up a cheap VPS for them, stating that it would be less work in the long run. I don't think they want to though since they have already (over)paid for the shared hosting plan.

Oh well. I think you are right. My only option is to manually upload everything including compiled assets.

Not hard initially but it will be difficult to perform any updates or maintain it in the future. For example, if I have to update the database structure, I will have to do so manually since I cant use database migrations (no access to artisan commands).

Yeah several things might be quite hard to work around. :)

Some things you can do from hidden pages in your application. EG a route that (maybe after confirming a long password) runs the artisan command for you.

Interesting. I guess, to extend on that idea, I could set up my own admin dashboard with controls for certain artisan commands.

Might be worth it depending on how much trouble I run into down the road.

The need to create this, shows the costs that will be forwarded extra to the client. Another good point against shared hosting :)

For anyone who eventually finds this, here are the results of my endeavors when trying to deploy on shared hosting.

Laravel 6.x requires the following php extensions: BCMath, Ctype, JSON, Mbstring, OpenSSL, PDO, Tokenizer, XML

OpenSSL ,Tokenzier and Ctype are not available on shared hosting.

There is no terminal access, meaning I have to upload everything via FTP and phpmyadmin. This may have worked ok, but there is no option to use artisan commands, so everything has to be done manually.

The shared hosting provider I looked into was HostPapa. Other providers may be different. For example, I used shared hosting a couple years ago which provided ssh access while telling me to please stay within my home directory when doing so. Scary to think about really.

You can actually run artisan from a controller

https://laravel.com/docs/6.x/artisan#programmatically-executing-commands

Ah yes, you are right. Sorry about the error there.