
## Introduction

Laravel is a popular, simple and flexible [PHP](/docs/deploy/php) application framework that is ideal for modern, full-stack web apps.

Laravel provides a great developer experience with its many built-in features like dependency injections, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing, and more.

In this guide, we create a basic Laravel application, push it to a GitHub repository, and deploy it on the Koyeb Serverless Platform using git-driven deployment which allows you to push your code without having to take care of the build, deployment, and run process. Koyeb handles all this for you.

By deploying your Laravel application on [Koyeb](/), you benefit from the platform's built-in autoscaling, autohealing, TLS encryption, global load balancing across our edge network, service discovery, and more.

If you want to learn how to [Dockerize and Deploy a Laravel Application to Production](/tutorials/dockerize-and-deploy-a-laravel-application-to-production), make sure to check out the linked guide.

## Requirements

To follow and complete this guide successfully, you need:

- A [Koyeb account](https://app.koyeb.com/) to deploy and run the Laravel web application
- The [Koyeb CLI](/docs/cli/installation) installed to interact with Koyeb from the command line
- A [GitHub account](https://github.com/)
- [PHP](https://www.php.net/) and [Composer](https://getcomposer.org/) installed on your machine

## Steps

To deploy a Laravel web application on the Koyeb serverless platform, you need to follow these three steps:

1. [**Create a new Laravel application**](#create-a-new-laravel-application)
2. [**Push the Laravel application to a GitHub repository**](#push-the-laravel-application-to-a-git-hub-repository)
3. [**Deploy the Laravel application on Koyeb**](#deploy-the-laravel-application-on-koyeb)

## Create a new Laravel application

To get started, we will create a new Laravel project using Composer, a PHP package manager. In your terminal, run the following command:

```
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-on-koyeb
```

This command will create a new Laravel application in the `laravel-on-koyeb` directory and install all the dependencies required by the app to run properly.

You can launch the application in development mode by running the following command in your terminal from the `laravel-on-koyeb` directory:

```
php artisan serve
```

Open a browser window and navigate to the `http://localhost:8000` URL. You land on the Laravel welcome page.

### Generate a key for Laravel's encryption services

Generate an APP_KEY to properly secure user sessions and other encrypted data by running:

```
php artisan key:generate --show
```

Save this value in a safe place. We will pass it to Koyeb as an `ENV_VAR` when we deploy the Laravel app on the platform later.

### Add a Procfile

A `Procfile` tells Koyeb how to run your application. Create a `Profile` in your application's root directory by executing:

```
echo "web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 public/" > Procfile
```

## Push the Laravel application to a GitHub Repository

Now that we have created our Laravel application, we will create a git directory to store it. Return to your `laravel-on-koyeb` directory and initialize a new git directory for your Laravel project:

```
git init
```

### Add a .gitignore file

To keep only the necessary files in the repository, add this .gitignore file to exclude all unnecessary Laravel files.

```
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/master/Laravel.gitignore > .gitignore
```

Execute the following command to add and commit the changes made in your files to your repository:

```
git add .
git commit -m "Laravel app initial commit"
```

Then add these changes to your remote GitHub repository for this app.

```
git remote add origin git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/laravel-on-koyeb.git
```

Rename the repository default branch to main executing:

```
git branch -M main
```

Next, push your changes to the GitHub repository by running:

```
git push -u origin main
```

You are now ready to deploy your application on Koyeb.

## Deploy the Laravel application on Koyeb

Go to the [Koyeb control panel](https://app.koyeb.com). On the **Overview** tab, click the **Create Web Service** button to begin:

1. Choose **GitHub** as the deployment method.
2. Select your `laravel-on-koyeb` repository from the list.
3. In the **Environment variables** section, click the **Add variable** button to add an `APP_KEY` variable set to the value you generated in [the step above](#generate-a-key-for-laravel-s-encryption-services).
4. Choose a name for your App and Service, for example `laravel-on-koyeb`, and click **Deploy**.

You land on the deployment page of your service where you can follow the progress of your Laravel application's deployment. Koyeb is building and deploying your application. Once the build and deployment are completed, you can access your application by clicking the App URL ending with `koyeb.app` in the Koyeb control panel.

If you want to learn about how Koyeb automatically builds your Laravel applications from git, make sure to read our [**how we build from git**](/docs/apps/build-from-git) documentation.

Your Laravel application is now running on Koyeb and benefits from native autoscaling, automatic HTTPS (SSL), auto-healing, and global load-balancing across our edge network.

## Conclusion

In this guide, you learned how to deploy a Laravel application on Koyeb and benefit from its built-in continuous deployment pipeline. Each change you push to your repository will automatically trigger a new build and deployment on the Koyeb Serverless Platform.

Your changes then go live as soon as the deployment passes all necessary health checks. In case of a failure during one of your deployments, we ensure to keep the latest working deployment active so your application is always up and running.

Want more PHP resources? Check out our [PHP documentation](/docs/deploy/php) and [one-click PHP app](/deploy/php) to learn how to deploy a PHP application on Koyeb.

If you would like to read more Koyeb tutorials, check out out our [tutorials collection](/tutorials). Have an idea for a tutorial you'd like us to cover? Let us know by joining the conversation over on the **[Koyeb community platform](https://community.koyeb.com/)**!


This guide shows how to deploy a Laravel application on the Koyeb Serverless Platform using git-driven deployment. Git-driven deployment allows you to push your code without having to take care of the build, deployment, and run process. Koyeb handles all this for you.

Deploy a Laravel Application with Continuous Deployment on Koyeb


**Koyeb provides developers the fastest way to deploy full stack applications and APIs globally. Want to deploy your Laravel application in minutes? [Sign up](https://app.koyeb.com/) today and deploy 2 services for free forever!**

## Introduction

Laravel is a popular, simple and flexible PHP application framework.
Laravel comes with many build features offering a great developer experience such as thorough dependency injection, an expressive database abstraction layer, queues and scheduled jobs, unit and integration testing, and more.

In this guide, we will explain how to dockerize and deploy a Laravel application to production using Docker to containerize our application and deploy it to the Koyeb Serverless Platform.

By deploying your Laravel application on Koyeb, you benefit from native autoscaling, autohealing, TLS encryption, global load balancing across our edge network, service discovery, and more.

## Requirements

To successfully follow and complete this guide, you need:

- [Docker](https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/) installed on your machine
- A [Koyeb account](https://app.koyeb.com) to deploy and run the Laravel web application
- The [Koyeb CLI](/docs/cli/installation) installed to interact with Koyeb from the command line
- Have a registry we will use to store our Laravel web app Docker image and deploy it on Koyeb

## Steps

To successfully deploy a Laravel web application on the Koyeb serverless platform, you need to follow these steps:

1. [**Create a new Laravel application**](#create-a-new-laravel-application)
2. [**Dockerize the Laravel application**](#dockerize-the-laravel-application)
3. [**Push the Docker image to a container registry**](#push-the-docker-image-to-a-container-registry)
4. [**Deploy the Dockerized Laravel web app on Koyeb**](#deploy-the-dockerized-laravel-web-app-on-koyeb)

## Create a new Laravel application

_If you already have an existing Laravel application you want to dockerize and deploy on Koyeb, you can jump to the next step._

To get started, we will create a new Laravel project using Composer, a PHP package manager. In your terminal, run the following command:

```bash
composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-demo
```

This command will create a new Laravel application in the `laravel-demo` directory and install all the dependencies required by the app to run properly.

You can launch the application in development mode by running the following command in your terminal from the `laravel-demo` directory:

```bash
php artisan serve
```

Open a browser window and navigate to the `http://localhost:8000` URL. You should see the Laravel welcome page.

## Dockerize the Laravel application

With our minimalistic Laravel application ready, we can now create the Dockerfile that we will use to containerize our Laravel application.

We will use the `webdevops/php-nginx:7.4-alpine` as the base image which provides Nginx with PHP-FPM installed and configured. The image can be customized depending on your needs. You can read the full documentation [here](https://dockerfile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/content/DockerImages/dockerfiles/php-nginx.html).
In your application directory, create a new file named `Dockerfile` and paste the following code:

```dockerfile
FROM webdevops/php-nginx:7.4-alpine

# Install Laravel framework system requirements (https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/deployment#optimizing-configuration-loading)
RUN apk add oniguruma-dev postgresql-dev libxml2-dev
RUN docker-php-ext-install \
        bcmath \
        ctype \
        fileinfo \
        json \
        mbstring \
        pdo_mysql \
        pdo_pgsql \
        tokenizer \
        xml

# Copy Composer binary from the Composer official Docker image
COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer

ENV WEB_DOCUMENT_ROOT /app/public
ENV APP_ENV production
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .

RUN composer install --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
# Optimizing Configuration loading
RUN php artisan config:cache
# Optimizing Route loading
RUN php artisan route:cache
# Optimizing View loading
RUN php artisan view:cache

RUN chown -R application:application .
```

As you probably noticed, we don't specify the `CMD` to tell Docker how to run our container.
This is because the base image `FROM webdevops/php-nginx:7.4-alpine` run the Nginx and PHP-FPM in the foreground and we inherit this command.

If your application requires additional php extensions, you can install them using the `docker-php-ext-install` command.

_In this guide we will push the Docker image to the Docker Hub. You are free to use another different registry as Koyeb allows you to deploy from any container registry._

To build the image run the following command and replace `<DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>` with your own.

```bash
docker build -t <DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>/laravel-demo .
```

Once the build is complete, you can run the image locally to ensure everything is working as expected.

```bash
docker run --rm -t -p 9000:80 <DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>/laravel-demo
```

## Push the Docker image to a container registry

Now that we have our Docker image ready, we can push it to the Docker Hub by running:

```bash
docker push <DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>/laravel-demo
```

Once the image is successfully pushed to the Docker Hub, we can use it to deploy the Laravel application on Koyeb.

## Deploy the Dockerized Laravel web app on Koyeb

With the previous steps completed, we can now deploy our application on production to Koyeb.
This section explains how to deploy on the Koyeb serverless platform using the CLI. This operation can also be performed using the [control panel](https://app.koyeb.com).

First, we need to create a Koyeb Secret containing the Docker Hub configuration to deploy private images. In your terminal execute the following command and replace `<DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>` and `<DOCKER_HUB_TOKEN>`
with your own.

```bash
echo \
'{
  "auths": {
    "index.docker.io/v1/": {
      "username": "<DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>",
      "password": "<DOCKER_HUB_TOKEN>"
    }
  }
}' | koyeb secrets create docker-hub-credentials --value-from-stdin
```

We can now deploy the Laravel application by running:

```bash
koyeb app init laravel-demo --docker "<DOCKER_HUB_USERNAME>/laravel-demo" --docker-private-registry-secret docker-hub-credentials
```

This command creates a new Koyeb App and deploy the Laravel application using the Docker image. To retrieve your Koyeb App URL and access your application, run:

```bash
$koyeb app get laravel-demo
ID                                  	NAME           	DOMAINS                             	UPDATED AT
d58ebed1-48c0-46b7-a2f1-91f3ffdbcccc	laravel-demo  	laravel-demo-<YOUR_ORG>.koyeb.app	    2021-06-28 12:46:55.411403 +0000 UTC
```

Open the URL in your browser to access your application running on Koyeb.

## Conclusion

This guide shows how easy it is to deploy your Laravel application in production using Docker and Koyeb. Want to [deploy your Laravel application with continuous deployment](/tutorials/deploy-a-laravel-application-with-continuous-deployment-on-koyeb)? We have a tutorial for that too. 😉

Ready for more PHP resources? Check out our [PHP documentation](/docs/deploy/php) and [one-click PHP app](/deploy/php) to learn how to deploy a PHP application on Koyeb.

Thanks to Koyeb native global load balancing edge network, your content is distributed near your users and your app comes with native TLS encryption.


Deploy your Laravel applications in seconds with zero-config. No credit card required.

Marvel at Laravel

This guide explains how to dockerize and deploy a Laravel application to production using Docker to containerized our app and the Koyeb Serverless Platform to run the application.