A guide to deploying a Laravel and Vue.js web app

This is a guide to deploying a Laravel web application with a JavaScript-based frontend. The guide will take you from a fresh Linux server to a fully-functioning Laravel application served over HTTPS from a custom domain name with automated redeployment.

Before you start…

This tutorial is written with the expectation that:

• You’re prepared to operate in a Linux command line environment.
• You have root access to a Linux server on which you will host your app.
• You can access the server over SSH and have the basic SSH knowledge required to do so (e.g. generating a public/private keypair; copying your public key to the authorized_keys file on the server; logging in over SSH).

The guide

This guide is divided into four parts, which you should read through in sequence, beginning with part 1.

• Part 1: Steps taken on your server once per server (start here)
• Part 2: Steps taken on your server once per Laravel application
• Part 3: Deploying your application for the first time
• Part 4: Automating redeployment

More about the tutorial

Why write this?

My goal in writing this was to document the process for my future reference and hopefully help anyone else doing the same thing along the way.

Tech stack used in this tutorial

• Server: either a virtual private server (e.g. a Digital Ocean droplet) or a physical server, running a Debian-based Linux distro (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu).
• Backend: Laravel
• Web server: Nginx
• Database: your choice of MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite
• Frontend: Any JavaScript-based framework (e.g. Vue, React, etc.) for which you could reasonably define an npm run build script. The frontend has a relatively minor role in this guide.

Conventions

I’ll generally show shell prompts in username@host$ format, and sometimes append the current working directory username@host:cwd$ for clarity:

# You on your development machine
you@dev$ whoami
you

# A shell command issued as root user on the server
root@server$ whoami
root

# A shell command issued as laravel user on the server
laravel@server$ whoami
laravel

# A shell command issued as laravel user from home directory
laravel@server:~$ pwd
/home/laravel

# A shell command issued as laravel user from /var/www
laravel@server:/var/www$ pwd
/var/www

Other conventions:

• I’ll use 1.2.3.4 as a server IP address.
• I’ll use laravel as the name of the non-root user on your app’s server and as the name of your project’s root serverside directory.

Feedback, suggestions, etc.

If you have ideas for improving the series, I will quite likely implement them, appreciate your input, and give you a shoutout for your contributions. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Shoutouts to readers: many thanks to Nicola Pugliese and Kai Breucker for catching mistakes and offering good ideas on how improve this series.

You can reach me by email at [email protected] or by opening an issue or pull request at github.com/ejmastnak/ejmastnak.com).

Want to say thank you?

You could:

• Send me an email! Seriously, if this material helped you, it will make my day to know. I love hearing from readers, and you’ll almost certainly get a message back from me.

• Contribute financially. Based on reader input, there are in fact people out there interested in compensating me financially for this guide. That’s awesome—thank you! You can Buy Me a Coffee here.

Other guides

Below is a list of other great guides to deploying a Laravel app that I’ve found online and taken inspiration from. Each covers the material from a slightly different angle, so you’ll probably get something out of reading all of them.

• Loris Leiva’s guide to zero-downtime redeployment
• Farhan Hasin Chowdhury’s guide to deploying a Laravel web app on a VPS
• J. Alexander Curtis’s guide to deploying a Laravel 5.3 app on a LEMP stack).

Historical note

Full disclosure: this guide is a rewrite of an older version I had published in the summer of 2023, which I replaced in the summer of 2024 with the current version, which you are reading now. Here is the old version, if you are curious.

The old version covered the same material, but presented it in an order I later realized was scattered and unstructured, jumping around from dev machine to app-specific server settings to global server settings and back in a rather chaotic way, sometimes overwriting steps taken earlier in the tutorial.

The current version is more streamlined and follows a logical progression from global server settings to app-specific server settings to deployment, which also reflects how I currently deploy my Laravel apps after a few years’ experience.