I was unable to find a single tutorial that would show exactly how to install Laravel on Debian, possibly because I was using PHP 7.0 on Debian, which no other examples seemed to use. As such, I had to take bits and pieces from different websites to make this tutorial on installing Laravel on Debian. The same tutorial will also work for Ubuntu but I found that on Ubuntu 16.04 a lot of the dependencies were already installed out of the box, Debian may require more care to make sure everything is present. Once you have all the requirements installed it should be easy to install composer, and once composer is installed Laravel should also be fairly simple if you are doing the right things.
I found that some methods of installing Laravel did not work on my setup, this may have been because it was Debian or because I’d missed a requirement. This is the method that worked for me, and also works on Ubuntu.
Before starting the most important thing is to make sure to apt-get upgrade and apt-get update… and also, make sure all the Laravel server requirements are installed. Once that’s done, restart/reload and begin. From here, you can install composer by typing these commands into the Linux terminal…
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Then navigate to where you want to put the new website and create a new project. The name of the project will be the name of the directory, so here I’ve called it example.com, because it is a shared server…
cd /var/www
sudo composer create-project laravel/laravel **example.com** --prefer-dist
This way you can easily specify the directory name. There is an alternative method here.
After installation, the last thing it should tell you is what the encryption key is. A good thing to do right away would be to check that this is the same as the value in the .env file. If the installation was successful it should be there, but it is good to check and also to have a first encounter with the .env file!
Now, set up this new domain as normal on your webserver, making sure that instead of pointing to the /var/www/example.com directory, you point to /var/www/example.com/public.
Next, one thing that I was not prepared for with Laravel was the need for the ownerships and permissions to be correct. All the files will probably be owned by the root user, so change them to whichever user they should be (i.e. not root). So, navigate to your web directory and change the owner as follows…
cd /var/www
sudo chown -R youruser **example.com**
Then, after that navigate to the public folder in your directory and it may not work. First make sure the storage directory has the correct owner, group and permissions…
cd /var/www/**example.com**
sudo chown -R youruser:www-data storage
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage
Changing storage may fix the problem, or if there are still problems you can also do this for the bootstrap/cache directory.
Now, make sure your site is pointing at the public directory and it should be working now and showing you the Laravel welcome page…
If you see a page like this in your browser in the public directory, Laravel was installed and is working.
If not check the requirements are installed, then the permissions, owners, and groups. In particular, if it is a brand new web server with no other websites already running on it, check things like MySQL and all the requirements for both Composer and Laravel.
From this stage, if you see the Laravel welcome page you’re all set up. You can set up a database and a database user in MySQL and enter the information in the .env file. You should also make sure that mod_rewrite is installed and that your Virtual host config file is allowing it to work.
If you run the composer create-project
command but you get an error, maybe you have some missing dependencies, the files will be in the new directory but nothing will be installed yet. To install you’ll need to install the dependencies then run the command composer update laravel
which will complete the installation. I got this error on Ubuntu 16.04 because PHPUnit was not installed.
If after following this guide you get an error like… No application encryption key has been specified. Run this command to generate a key (automatically adds it to the .ENV file)… php artisan key:generate
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