Category: Laravel

The following is a list of plugins I have installed to help with Laravel Development, I will add to them as I go, I will also remove the ones i don’t think were worth it from the list as well

Plugin	What for	Publisher
PHP IntelliSense	Advanced Autocompletion and Refactoring support for PHP	Felix Becker
PHP Namespace Resolver	Import and expand php namespaces	Mehedi Hassan
laravel-blade	Laravel blade syntax highlighting	Christian Howe
Laravel Blade Snippets	Laravel blade snippets and syntax highlight support	Winnie Lin
Laravel goto view	Quick jump to view	codingyu
Better Align	Align code without selecting them first	wwm

If you are like me, running only your own projects on a server, you might want to skip authentication

the changes I generally make to the file /etc/redis/redis.conf are

1- At the very beginning, limit the RAM redis can use with the line

maxmemory 2gb

2- Change the supervisor to systemd by modifying the line

supervised no

to

supervised systemd

Now, to test the new config, from the command line, run the following commands

systemctl restart redis-server
redis-cli
ping
config get maxmemory
quit

You have just configured redis and tested your new settings.

At this stage, this posst is a stub, I am simply compiling information here then I will come back to edit this

Under linux, the Laravel extensions that i like up to now are

• Laravel Blade Snippets (For blade templates)
• PHP namespace resolver (So that we don’t need to look for what namespaces provide for the classes we are using)
• PHP Intelephense (PHP Autocomplete/intellisense ref finder, etc…)

This part of the tutorial is a hands on setup to have Laravel working on nginx under Linux. this is not the only way to run Laravel, for all the options, see here

NOTE: Most if not all of the popular development tools are available for Linux and Windows, so If this setup is for development, you might want to install Debian Linux with the Gnome GUI so that you can install the development tools used in the next part of this tutorial, if you are going to be developing on a different machine or this is for production, then you shouldn’t.

STEP 1: Install Debian 11 (Bullseye) on a computer.

STEP 2: Install the basic Laravel environment with the following commands, Laravel 9 requires PHP 8, which at the time of writing is not available in Debian 11 repositories, so we will need to add the repositories from the guy who manages PHP for Debian anyway

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates apt-transport-https software-properties-common gnupg unzip curl
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sury-php.list
wget -qO - https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg | apt-key add -
apt-get update

Now, to the actual installation of the environment

apt install php8.1-fpm nginx
apt install php8.1-{dev,common,xml,tokenizer,zip,mysql,curl,mbstring,mysql,opcache,gd,intl,xsl,bcmath,imap,soap,readline,sqlite3,gmp}
apt install redis-server
apt-get install php8.1-redis
apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Now you need to secure redis !

Now remember to secure your mariaDB (MySQL) installation with the following command

mysql_secure_installation

Next, we need composer, the PHP dependency manager, to get it execute the following

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer
composer --version

The last line above should show you what version of composer you have just installed

Now, remember to never run composer as root, but rather as a regular user, from this point on I am assuming you are running the terminal as a regular user.

I understand that Debian puts the web root in /var/www/html, but i usually like to create a separate directory called /var/vhosts and put all my web projects in it

mkdir /var/vhosts

Now, we need to create a sample project for our learning and training experience

cd /var/vhosts
composer create-project laravel/laravel laraveltestapp
chmod -R 0777 /var/vhosts/laravelapp/storage

Next, We would need to setup nginx to serve this website (“Would like to” actually, because there are alternatives, but I’m keeping it simple), here is an almost standard template for nginx, modify the host name and project name to match your project and preferences.

NGINX vhost config file (In my case /etc/nginx/sites-available/laraveltestapp)

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name ltest.net www.ltest.net;
    root /var/vhosts/laraveltestapp/public;

    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/php8.1-fpm.sock;
#	fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

Surely for this to work, you will need to add the following two lines to the end of the /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1 ltest.net
127.0.0.1 www.ltest.net

As soon as we have the file above, we need to create a symbolic link for it in the sites enabled directory

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/laraveltestapp

Suddenly, it works through nginx, you should see the welcome page (View) here

Now, to the development environment, how to setup your development environment can be found here

The following are things that are commonly used with Laravel. broken down by category

Environment tools and solutions

• PHP composer (Mandatory)
• Docker – Sail (Optional)

Relevant / Compatible server side software

• Apache2 (2.4) (Web Server)
• Nginx (Web Server)
• PHP (PHP8.x for Laravel 9)
• redis (Data structure store)
• memcache (in-memory, distributed cache)
• MeiliSearch (Search application)
• MailHog (email-testing tool with a fake SMTP server)
• Selinium (browser automation)
• MySQL/Mariadb (Database engine, most common)
• PostgreSQL (Database Engine, very powerful)

Development environments

• Microsoft Visual Studio Code (Free): built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js, extensions include PHP
• Sublime text (Not free, works but nags)
• Apache beans (Free)
• IntellijIDEA (Not free, one month trial)
• PHPStorm (Same as IntellijIDEA without the other languages support, Not Free, one month trial)

Database Management

• MAC: Sequel Pro and sequel ace
• ALL: PHPMyAdmin, mysql workbench (Oracle),
• sqlyog (Windows and Linux)

Other

• Node.js
• NPM (Installed with node.js): npm is a package manager for the JavaScript to work with front end stuff like node.js, react.js, bootstrap, tailwind CSS,
• Yarn (NPM alternative from Facebook)
• GIT: track changes in source code