Run Laravel on Google Compute Engine

Before firing up your VM, ensure that you have created a project on your GCP console.

After you’ve created your project, head over to your menu items and select Compute Engine > VM Instances. Once there, click on the “Create Instance” button to fire up your VM instance.

Give your new VM a name, choose a region of your choice, select your machine type and then the boot disk(Debian). When done, click save to fire up your new vm.

In this section, we are going to configure our VM by installing Apache Web server, PHP and Git. (We will use Google Cloud’s managed SQL db, Cloud SQL for our database.). We will use GCP’s in browser ssh window to access the VM.

Start by updating and upgrading the vm OS

After this, we proceed to setup Apache

Let’s now proceed and install PHP 7.3, the needed PHP Extensions and Application Repository:

Let’s install git on our server

Before we get started, you need to know that Laravel is installed via composer (If you don’t already know :0 ). Composer is an application-level package manager for the PHP programming language that provides a standard format for managing dependencies of PHP software and required libraries. Now, let’s proceed and install composer →

If you already have an existing project hosted on git, just clone your repository here, then run composer install to install all your project dependencies.

We will now configure our Apache server to be able to serve our Laravel project. We’ll switch our working directory to /etc/apache2/sites-available and create a conf file. Name this conf file the same name as your project directory.

Edit the conf file to the following.

For server name use the domain that you will link your server with.

For the next step, we will symbolically link our virtual hosts files from the sites-available directory to the sites-enabled directory. Replace the example.com.conf with the name you gave your conf file that we edited above.

At this point, your web server should be serving your Laravel project. You can link your domain with the your VM’s IP address. What’s remaining now is setting up your database.

On your GCP menu, select SQL and set up your MySQL instance.

From the instance that you just set up, create your project db.

You’re Good to go.

That’s it! I hope this has been of help to you!

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