Deployment
- Introduction
- Server Requirements
- Server Configuration
- Optimization
- Debug Mode
- Deploying With Forge / Vapor
Introduction
When you're ready to deploy your Laravel application to production, there are some important things you can do to make sure your application is running as efficiently as possible. In this document, we'll cover some great starting points for making sure your Laravel application is deployed properly.
Server Requirements
The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum PHP version and extensions:
- PHP >= 7.3
- BCMath PHP Extension
- Ctype PHP Extension
- Fileinfo PHP Extension
- JSON PHP Extension
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
- XML PHP Extension
Server Configuration
Nginx
If you are deploying your application to a server that is running Nginx, you may use the following configuration file as a starting point for configuring your web server. Most likely, this file will need to be customized depending on your server's configuration. If you would like assistance in managing your server, consider using a first-party Laravel server management and deployment service such as Laravel Forge.
Please ensure, like the configuration below, your web server directs all requests to your application's public/index.php
file. You should never attempt to move the index.php
file to your project's root, as serving the application from the project root will expose many sensitive configuration files to the public Internet:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
root /srv/example.com/public;
add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
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;
}
}
Optimization
Autoloader Optimization
When deploying to production, make sure that you are optimizing Composer's class autoloader map so Composer can quickly find the proper file to load for a given class:
composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
{tip} In addition to optimizing the autoloader, you should always be sure to include a
composer.lock
file in your project's source control repository. Your project's dependencies can be installed much faster when acomposer.lock
file is present.
Optimizing Configuration Loading
When deploying your application to production, you should make sure that you run the config:cache
Artisan command during your deployment process:
php artisan config:cache
This command will combine all of Laravel's configuration files into a single, cached file, which greatly reduces the number of trips the framework must make to the filesystem when loading your configuration values.
{note} If you execute the
config:cache
command during your deployment process, you should be sure that you are only calling theenv
function from within your configuration files. Once the configuration has been cached, the.env
file will not be loaded and all calls to theenv
function for.env
variables will returnnull
.
Optimizing Route Loading
If you are building a large application with many routes, you should make sure that you are running the route:cache
Artisan command during your deployment process:
php artisan route:cache
This command reduces all of your route registrations into a single method call within a cached file, improving the performance of route registration when registering hundreds of routes.
Optimizing View Loading
When deploying your application to production, you should make sure that you run the view:cache
Artisan command during your deployment process:
php artisan view:cache
This command precompiles all your Blade views so they are not compiled on demand, improving the performance of each request that returns a view.
Debug Mode
The debug option in your config/app.php configuration file determines how much information about an error is actually displayed to the user. By default, this option is set to respect the value of the APP_DEBUG environment variable, which is stored in your .env file.
In your production environment, this value should always be false
. If the APP_DEBUG
variable is set to true
in production, you risk exposing sensitive configuration values to your application's end users.
Deploying With Forge / Vapor
Laravel Forge
If you aren't quite ready to manage your own server configuration or aren't comfortable configuring all of the various services needed to run a robust Laravel application, Laravel Forge is a wonderful alternative.
Laravel Forge can create servers on various infrastructure providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, and more. In addition, Forge installs and manages all of the tools needed to build robust Laravel applications, such as Nginx, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Beanstalk, and more.
Laravel Vapor
If you would like a totally serverless, auto-scaling deployment platform tuned for Laravel, check out Laravel Vapor. Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel, powered by AWS. Launch your Laravel infrastructure on Vapor and fall in love with the scalable simplicity of serverless. Laravel Vapor is fine-tuned by Laravel's creators to work seamlessly with the framework so you can keep writing your Laravel applications exactly like you're used to.