Hosting a Laravel site in windows on a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 Server in VirtualBox.

Installing docker is explained here.
Hosting a simple site with docker is explained here.
Hosting a simple site and setting up a lamp server here.

The real test will be to set up a laravel site

1. How easy it is to set up
2. How easy it is to add a new site
3. How fast is is to add a new site

I will use devilbox, a pre made LAMP stack to try and host my Laravel website.

Since I'm only using a 10GB virtual drive for my linux server, I can't start all the containers it provides. But for hosting a laravel website I'll only need httpd, php and mysql.

• git clone https://github.com/cytopia/devilbox
• cd devilbox cp env-example .env
• docker-compose up -d httpd php mysql
  • first time setup 4 min
  • once the images are loaded

• Enter the php shell so we have access to composer etc ./shell.sh
• Make a folder, enter the folder and git clone your project in there. Mine is called wedstrijd.
• Enter the laravel project and composer install. This took 18s65.
• To make a database we can surf to the ip of our server and just use phpmyadmin out of the box.
• The root folder is always /htdocs. So make a symbolic link from the public folder to htdos. ln -s wedstrijd/public/ htdocs
• To make the host we have to edit /etc/hosts on windows. The generated path is wedstrijd.loc. e.g. 192.168.0.110 wedstrijd.loc

We will need to install all packages needed to host laravel ourselves.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === '93b54496392c062774670ac18b134c3b3a95e5a5e5c8f1a9f115f203b75bf9a129d5daa8ba6a13e2cc8a1da0806388a8') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

To add it to our bin we use mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Now just install laravel and add the Vhost.

The regular LAMP way still works but is not always as easy to configure because of Ubuntu updates etc, while docker images run their own version of ubuntu where everything will always work. Docker makes it easier to dispose of a website and you can use docker without a VM aswell. Docker is more complex but if Devilbox keeps its images updated then it's a great way to get started really fast.