2014-02-08

Level Up - Webmaster: Installing Laravel and Composer on Bluehost

These steps will get you though getting Laravel up and running on your Bluehost server, though these instructions should be a good enough how-to for other shared hosting providers as well.

This was my first time experiencing (and hearing of) Laravel and Composer and had to look at many websites to figure this information out. Below is a walkthrough of all the steps I would have needed in one location. For more advanced and specific informations, I provide links at the end. But, the steps shown should be enough to get going quickly from scratch.

1.  SSH into your server at ~/bin/
2. Ensure that you have PHP 5.3.7+ on your server. Composer requires 5.3.2+ and Laravel requires PHP 5.3.7+. You can check with which php and which php-cli
3. Install Composer: Run the command curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
4. Test that the installation worked by running php-cli composer.phar
5. Install Laravel: Run the command php-cli composer.phar create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist
Note: Step 5 may take a minute or two, there are many dependencies that have to also be installed for Laravel.

Extra steps
6. Look at this file for project-specific adjustable values: app/config/app.php and bootstrap/paths.php
7. See my next post for more walkthrough

More info:
- Laravel installation instructions
- Laravel configuration instructions
- Then, the Quickstart


Error: "warning: composer should be invoked via the CLI version of PHP, not the cgi-fcgi SAPI"
Fix: Use the command php-cli instead of php.


~ Danial Goodwin ~



2 comments:

oliver said...

Bluehost has got a bad reputation as it is an EIG company. It is better to avoid it. There are lots of other better Laravel hosting providers out there, like Cloudways and Fortrabbit. Or you could also go with vps like digitalocean or vultr.

Dan said...

I've moved away from Bluehost too, currently using Digital Ocean now. ;)