Deploying a Laravel application to Elastic Beanstalk

Laravel is an open source, model-view-controller (MVC) framework for PHP. This tutorial walks you through the process of generating a Laravel application, deploying it to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment, and configuring it to connect to an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database instance.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have knowledge of the basic Elastic Beanstalk operations and the Elastic Beanstalk console. If you haven't already, follow the instructions in Getting started with Elastic Beanstalk to launch your first Elastic Beanstalk environment.

To follow the procedures in this guide, you will need a command line terminal or shell to run commands. Commands are shown in listings preceded by a prompt symbol ($) and the name of the current directory, when appropriate.

~/eb-project$ this is a command
this is output

On Linux and macOS, you can use your preferred shell and package manager. On Windows you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux to get a Windows-integrated version of Ubuntu and Bash.

Laravel 6 requires PHP 7.2 or later. It also requires the PHP extensions listed in the server requirements topic in the official Laravel documentation. Follow the instructions in the topic Setting up your PHP development environment for Elastic Beanstalk to install PHP and Composer.

For Laravel support and maintenance information, see the support policy topic on the official Laravel documentation.

Launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment

Use the Elastic Beanstalk console to create an Elastic Beanstalk environment. Choose the PHP platform and accept the default settings and sample code.

Environment creation takes about 5 minutes and creates the following resources:

All of these resources are managed by Elastic Beanstalk. When you terminate your environment, Elastic Beanstalk terminates all the resources that it contains.

Install Laravel and generate a website

Composer can install Laravel and create a working project with one command:

~$ composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel eb-laravel

Composer installs Laravel and its dependencies, and generates a default project.

If you run into any issues installing Laravel, go to the installation topic in the official documentation: https://laravel.com/docs/6.x.

Deploy your application

Create a source bundle containing the files created by Composer. The following command creates a source bundle named laravel-default.zip. It excludes files in the vendor folder, which take up a lot of space and are not necessary for deploying your application to Elastic Beanstalk.

~/eb-laravel$ zip ../laravel-default.zip -r * .[^.]* -x "vendor/*"

Upload the source bundle to Elastic Beanstalk to deploy Laravel to your environment.

Configure Composer settings

When the deployment completes, click the URL to open your Laravel application in the browser:

What's this? By default, Elastic Beanstalk serves the root of your project at the root path of the website. In this case, though, the default page (index.php) is one level down in the public folder. You can verify this by adding /public to the URL. For example, http://laravel.us-east-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/public.

To serve the Laravel application at the root path, use the Elastic Beanstalk console to configure the document root for the website.

So far, so good. Next you'll add a database to your environment and configure Laravel to connect to it.

Add a database to your environment

Launch an RDS DB instance in your Elastic Beanstalk environment. You can use MySQL, SQLServer, or PostgreSQL databases with Laravel on Elastic Beanstalk. For this example, we'll use MySQL.

Creating a database instance takes about 10 minutes. For more information about databases coupled to an Elastic Beanstalk environment, see Adding a database to your Elastic Beanstalk environment.

In the meantime, you can update your source code to read connection information from the environment. Elastic Beanstalk provides connection details using environment variables, such as RDS_HOSTNAME, that you can access from your application.

Laravel's database configuration is stored in a file named database.php in the config folder in your project code. Find the mysql entry and modify the host, database, username, and password variables to read the corresponding values from Elastic Beanstalk:

...
    'connections' => [

        'sqlite' => [
            'driver' => 'sqlite',
            'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', database_path('database.sqlite')),
            'prefix' => '',
        ],

        'mysql' => [
            'driver' => 'mysql',
            'host' => env('RDS_HOSTNAME', '127.0.0.1'),
            'port' => env('RDS_PORT', '3306'),
            'database' => env('RDS_DB_NAME', 'forge'),
            'username' => env('RDS_USERNAME', 'forge'),
            'password' => env('RDS_PASSWORD', ''),
            'unix_socket' => env('DB_SOCKET', ''),
            'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
            'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
            'prefix' => '',
            'strict' => true,
            'engine' => null,
        ],
...

To verify that the database connection is configured correctly, add code to index.php to connect to the database and add some code to the default response:

...
if(DB::connection()->getDatabaseName())
{
   echo "Connected to database ".DB::connection()->getDatabaseName();
}
$response->send();
...

When the DB instance has finished launching, bundle and deploy the updated application to your environment.

Deploying a new version of your application takes less than a minute. When the deployment is complete, refresh the web page again to verify that the database connection succeeded:

Cleanup

When you finish working with Elastic Beanstalk, you can terminate your environment. Elastic Beanstalk terminates all AWS resources associated with your environment, such as Amazon EC2 instances, database instances, load balancers, security groups, and alarms.

With Elastic Beanstalk, you can easily create a new environment for your application at any time.

In addition, you can terminate database resources that you created outside of your Elastic Beanstalk environment. When you terminate an Amazon RDS DB instance, you can take a snapshot and restore the data to another instance later.

Next steps

For more information about Laravel, go to the Laravel official website at laravel.com.

As you continue to develop your application, you'll probably want a way to manage environments and deploy your application without manually creating a .zip file and uploading it to the Elastic Beanstalk console. The Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI) provides easy-to-use commands for creating, configuring, and deploying applications to Elastic Beanstalk environments from the command line.

In this tutorial, you used the Elastic Beanstalk console to configure composer options. To make this configuration part of your application source, you can use a configuration file like the following.

option_settings:
  aws:elasticbeanstalk:container:php:phpini:
    document_root: /public

For more information, see Advanced environment customization with configuration files (.ebextensions).

Running an Amazon RDS DB instance in your Elastic Beanstalk environment is great for development and testing, but it ties the lifecycle of your database to your environment. See Adding an Amazon RDS DB instance to your PHP Elastic Beanstalk environment for instructions on connecting to a database running outside of your environment.

Finally, if you plan on using your application in a production environment, you will want to configure a custom domain name for your environment and enable HTTPS for secure connections.