Deploying Laravel on shared Hosting

If you are here, you are probably exploring how laravel works on shared hosting, on some low-budget project or just have reasons you prefer shared hosting. Alright, let’s get down to business.

Here are the steps to get laravel up and running on shared hosting:

(1) Run php artisan config:clear; this clears the cache config. Since you are going to be editing .env online; you don’t need your local configurations cached.

(2) Export Your migrated Database to a file (db.sql) without the create database statement, like so:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `users`;

CREATE TABLE `users` (
 `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 `title` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
 `facebook_id` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `google_id` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `linkedin_id` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `tagline` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `email` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `username` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `email_verification_code` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `email_verified_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,

 `password` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
 `remember_token` varchar(100) DEFAULT NULL,
 `created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
 `updated_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `password_resets`;

CREATE TABLE `password_resets` (
 `email` varchar(254) NOT NULL,
 `token` varchar(254) NOT NULL,
 `created_at` timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL,
 KEY `password_resets_email_index` (`email`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

(3) go to MultiPHP Manager on c-panel and confirm you have php 7.1 or higher.

(4) Zip the finished project (we will call this myproject from now on) and upload to root directory of hosting storage through File Manager (c-panel) or FileZilla; it should be something like /home/domain-name.

(5) Extract myproject in root directory(/home/domain-name) of hosting storage.

(6) Enable “Show Hidden Files”. This is so you could see files like .htaccess, .env, etc.

(7) In myproject/public, move all it’s contents to /public_html.

(8) Now edit /public_html/index.php to point to your laravel project, like so:

//previous state
require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

// changed to
require __DIR__.'/../myproject/vendor/autoload.php';

//previous state
$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

//changed to
$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../myproject/bootstrap/app.php';

(9) Edit .env in /myproject with your config keys

(10) Import and run the db.sql script you exported earlier on your created database through phpmyadmin on c-panel.

The end!