Objective

• Setup Laravel Application
• Setup SSL for the Laravel application

Setup Laravel Application

• We will be hosting the laravel application on AWS EC2. You can create an account with free tier access from here
• Navigate to AWS Console.
• Create an EC2 instance
  • With t2.micro as the instance size
  • Create a new key pair, if it does not exists
  • With Debian as the AMI ( Can choose as per your needs ).
  • Create a new security group or use existing ones
• ( Optional ) Create a security group seperate from the default one, so that it is easy to modify the inbound and outbound rules.
• Dont forget to add inbound rules for port 80, 443 in the security group that you are using.
• Click on launch instance
• Next we need to set a static ip for the instance so that its IP does not change when we stop and start the instance.
• Navigate to Elastic IP in EC2 section. Click on Allocate Elastic IP.
• After the IP is allocated, click on Associate IP address and choose the instance that you created earlier.
• Copy the IP address, go to your domain registrar where you have bought the domain and point a subdomin or the apex domain to this IP address
• Once the instance is launched, connect to it using your system's terminal or EC2 instance connect
• Update the system using the following command

  sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
  

• Next we will install composer. It is a tool used for managing dependency, create projects in PHP
• Install composer using the following command

  sudo apt install composer -y
  

• Next we need to install apache. It is the web server that will serve the laravel application. Also we need to install additional php related packages
• Use the following command to do that

  sudo apt install apache2 php-curl php-xml libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-mbstring php-bcmath php-tokenizer php-zip -y
  

• After installing apache2 navigate to the /var/www/html directory
• Create a new project using the following command. If permission error occurs use sudo

  composer create-project "laravel/laravel:^10.0" testapp
  

• Here testapp is the name of the project, you can use any name you want
• Change the permissions of the testapp directory so that www-data user can access it.

  sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/testapp
  sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/testapp
  sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/testapp/storage
  sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/testapp/bootstrap/cache
  

• Navigate to /etc/apache2/sites-available directory and create a new file with the following convention your-domain.conf
• Edit the file with the following content

  <VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName your-domain
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/testapp/public
  
  <Directory /var/www/html/testapp>
  Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Require all granted
  </Directory>
  
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
  </VirtualHost>
  

• We have to enable the site using the following commands

  sudo a2enmod rewrite
  sudo a2enmod php8.2
  sudo a2ensite your-domain
  sudo systemctl restart apache2
  

Setup SSL for the Laravel application

• To setup ssl for the laravel application, we will use certbot

• Install certbot and related packages using the following command

  sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache -y
  

• Create the certificate using the following command

  sudo certbot --apache
  

• Enter your email when asked, agree to the terms, next agree if you are willing to share your email address

• The tool will detect the domains that are configured and will let you choose the domain for which the certificate needs to be downloaded

• Select the domain by entering the number corresponding to it

• Certificate is installed successfully

• With this we have hosted the laravel application with ssl using apache.