/Laravel

How to set up Laravel and Nginx in Ubuntu 18.04

Follow the instructions in the Laravel website to install Laravel.

After you have installed, delete the file .env.example

Then make the directories /storage and /bootstrap/cache writable by typing this:

sudo chown -R 777 storage/
sudo chown -R 777 bootstrap/cache

Create a file in /etc/nginx/sites-available directory. In my case I created on called larblog. Then copy this in that file:

server {
      listen 80;
      server_name blog.app;
      root <path to the public folder>;
  
      add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
      add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
      add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
  
      index index.html index.htm index.php;
  
      charset utf-8;
  
      location / {
          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
      }
  
      location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
      location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
  
      error_page 404 /index.php;
  
      location ~ \.php$ {
          fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
          fastcgi_index index.php;
          fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
          include fastcgi_params;
      }
  
      location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
          deny all;
      }

Put the path to the public folder of your Laravel project in root above. Put the url or ip address of the app in server_name.

Note that for the above you need to have php7.3-fpm installed. If you have php7.2 in your machine, then you need to install php7.2-fpm and replace the line in the above file like this

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock; ##Note the php7.2 here
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
## If it is Ubuntu 18.04
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php7.3-fpm

Type sudo nginx -t to check syntax of above nginx files you created and you should see this output if ok:

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Then go to /etc/hosts and add the name of your app there next to 127.0.0.1. In my case it is blog.app

  127.0.0.1       localhost
  127.0.0.1       blog.app
  
  # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
  ::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
  fe00::0 ip6-localnet
  ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
  ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
  ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

Then make a sym-link in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ like this:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/larblog /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Replace ‘larblog’ with the name of your laravel project

Then do

sudo systemctl reload nginx

Go to Chrome and type your url there. In this case it is blog.app. You should see your site.

If you see ‘502 Bad Gateway’, check nginx logs like this:

sudo tail -30 /var/log/nginx/error.log

I had this log in /var/log/nginx/error.log when I wrongly had php7.2 in the nginx file above

2020/03/13 23:21:11 [crit] 7111#7111: *10 connect() to unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: blog.app, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock:", host: "blog.app"
2020/03/13 23:21:12 [crit] 7111#7111: *10 connect() to unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: blog.app, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock:", host: "blog.app"
2020/03/13 23:21:13 [crit] 7111#7111: *10 connect() to unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: blog.app, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock:", host: "blog.app"

I installed php7.3-fpm as mentioned above and replaced the nginx file with php7.3 as mentioned above and the ‘Bad Gateway’ error went away.

Happy Coding.