Installing laravel on free hosting

Question

Following this Setup Laravel 5 Application without command-line access

I have a question about second criteria.

I'm using free hosting and I have the "htdocs" folder that is basically my "public_html"(I think so), because the displayed "index.html" file that comes by default is in it. So, following the second criteria from the above topic, I need to change the "htdocs" for "laravel_folder/public", correct? If so, how can I do this by .htaccess, please?

Answer 1

No, there you need to copy all the files inside the public folder (~/MyAwesomeProject/public/) into the public_html folder (~/public_html).

This blog article will help you to deploy Laravel project on Shared Hosting Server Using cPanel Options:

Laravel: Deploy Laravel Projects On Shared Hosting

Answer 2

I just deployed a Laravel 5.7 app on 000webhost which is free hosting website.

First of all, you have to generate a key for your app and erase the cache. Use the command: php artisan key: generate Then php artisan config: clear and finally php artisan cache: clear.

Now you take the folder / root directory or where you have your app, you have to compress it in a zip file.

Create a new folder in the root of the File Manager, for example a folder called App.

Upload the zip file to the App directory on https://files.000webhost.com/ by clicking on the "Upload Files" button on top right.

When it's done, you have to click on the zip file and select "Extract". Also make sure to write "." to extract the contents directly into App.

Make sure all the files are in App just like that.

Move all the files in the public folder (App/public) to the public_html folder.

Now that we have everything, we are going to configure what is necessary.

A previous step is to create a new database for them you will have to go to the section "Manage databases" and create one. Then manage the base in phpmyadmin and import the database of your project / application.

Once this step is completed, the following is:

1.-Configure index.php, in the directory public_html/index.php, you must add the App folder to the addresses of autoload.php and app.php.

Change require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

by require __DIR__.'/../App/vendor/autoload.php';

Change $app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

by $app = require_once __DIR__.'/../App/bootstrap/app.php';

Below this line add the following

$app->bind('path.public', function() {
    return base_path().'/public_html';
});

2.- Go to the .env file and modify the host, the database, the user and the password with the values of the database that we made in the previous step. Copy the APP_KEY also, we will use it later.

3.- In config/app.php, find the line : 'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', false), and change the value to true :

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', true),

find tehe line: 'key' => env('APP_KEY'), and add a comma followed by base64_decode ('copy the key that was in the .env file here'). For example:

'key' => env('APP_KEY',base64_decode('AsAAAAA+AWERSDFT4Y123Ywpj123PNaleLdPwcd0000=')),

4.- In the same directory but in the database.php file (config/database.php), find:

'mysql' => [
            'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
            'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
            'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
            'unix_socket' => env('DB_SOCKET', ''),
            'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
            'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
            'prefix' => '',
            'strict' => true,
            'engine' => null,
        ],

Add this line after host: 'options' => [PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => true,],

Modify the host, database, user, and password with the values in the database as in step 1.

'mysql' => [
            'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
            'options' => [PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => true,],
            'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'databaseNamehere'),
            'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'userNamehere'),
            'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', 'passwordHere'),
            'unix_socket' => env('DB_SOCKET', ''),
            'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
            'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
            'prefix' => '',
            'strict' => true,
            'engine' => null,
        ],

Now we can go to the address of the server and you can see your app running correctly.

I hope it helps you, greetings.

Answer 3

I just deployed a Laravel app on 000webhost which is free hosting website. I faced some problems, but here's how I solved them:

1- Go to your app's root directory (where app, public, resources and other directories exist) and zip them all into a one zip file (it is important for it to be zip not rar).

2- Upload the zip file to the public_html directory on https://files.000webhost.com/ by clicking on the "Upload Files" button on top right.

3- It will take some time to upload. When it's done, you have to click on the zip file and select "Extract". Also make sure to write "." to extract the contents directly into public_html.

4- Now if you go to the URL 000webhost provides for your site, let's call it $url, then add /public to it which is where your entry point index.php file resides, you'd suppose to see the homepage of your site: $url/public . But you won't.

5- For some reason I didn't understand, the .env file which is a shortcut of your config files in the config directory could not be read. So, you'll have to update your config files, mainly config/app.php and config/database.php.

6- The first problem you'll have is the key issue. In config/app.php, find the line :

'key' => env('APP_KEY'),

and replace env('APP_KEY') with the actual key that you see in you .env file (in case it is empty for you, you'll have to generate a key by sending the command on your computer php artisan key:generate)

7- If you are using a database (such as MySQL), then you'll have to also go to config/database.php and replace all values of env with actual values, mainly these values :

'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => env('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
            'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
            'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),

P.S: there should be NO env variable whatsoever. Remove all envvariables that you don't use and replace the rest with real values.

I couldn't figure out a way to do virtual host for the free version (maybe you can configure a vhost for the paid version..). So, you'll have to remember that the url provided by 000webhost should be appended by /public (I say this again because you might have to change your navbar links as well by applying this logic).

And voila! It should work now. Well, in case you face any more issues, there's 2 things you can really do to figure them out:

1- In config/app.php, change the debug value from false to true to see the errors instead of a "whoops" message :

'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', true),

2- You can check the storage/logs/laravel.log file to see the errors you are getting.

Good luck!

Answer 4

From memory of working on shared hosting this is going to be difficult. What you could do, assuming FTP access, is upload everything to your root level, and then in the Laravel configurations you can change the name of your public directory, so to htdocs

Though I think you might struggle with some of Laravels features without having command line access

I'm assuming you're developing for a production environment, if so you can get a cheap VPS or Droplet where you could effectively utilise Laravel alternatively VirtualBox or something for development would work well

Laravel quite heavily relies on Artisan (their Cli interface) as well as various tools within there (such as Migrate which works with Eloquent to deploy tables) so I think you might struggling using this on a shared box.

The reason for all of this reliance is because Laravel was built for Enterprise usage, where generally shared boxes aren't utilised.

I think there are some hosts out there who will give you command line access, however.

If you need to use a different MVC framework without having command line access CodeIgniter is a good one