Deploy Laravel Web App to Windows Server 2012

Some software is required as follows:

• XAMPP (Apache, PHP, Tomcat) (https://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/XAMPP%20Windows/)
• Composer (https://getcomposer.org/Composer-Setup.exe)
• PostgreSQL 9.5 (https://www.postgresql.org/download/windows/)
• PgAdmin 4 v2 (v3 run on web base) (https://www.pgadmin.org/download/pgadmin-4-windows/)
• JAVA JDK 8 (https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html)
• GIT (https://git-scm.com/download/)

Install Laravel application as follows:

• Git clone Laravel project by using the command

  git clone https://link_to_project mywebapp 
  

• Jump into a project folder and install Laravel by using composer

cd mywebapp 
composer install

• Copy .env.example file to .env file and change the database connection to PostgreSQL database

DB_CONNECTION=pgsql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=5432
DB_DATABASE=mywebappdb
DB_USERNAME=username
DB_PASSWORD=password

• Generate an application key

php artisan key:generate

• Change php.ini to enable pdo driver for Postgres

## find and uncomment those lines
extension=pdo_pgsql
extension=pgsql

Increase memory for php

memory_limit= 1028MB

• Migrate database and insert some default data

php artisan migrate
php artisan db:seed

• Run composer to autoload file

composer dump-autoload

• Link public folder to apache httpdocs (run on command prompt)

mklink /d C:\xampp\htdocs\mywebapp C:\Project\mywebapp\public

• Change host file in “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts”

## add more under 127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 mywebapp.localhost.com

• Add VirtualHost in “C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf”

  NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
  <Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/mywebapp">
      Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
      AllowOverride All
      Order deny,allow
      allow from All
  </Directory>
  ServerName bids.localhost.com
  ServerAlias www.bids.localhost.com
  DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/bids" 
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Test it on the browser with “mywebapp.localhost.com”