Configure remote Laravel app to be accessible from browser - php

Question

All the laravel projects I worked on were installed/configured started by other people. A long time ago I managed to install a Laravel project on a Windows machine using WAMP and it was easier as far as I remember.
I recently received access to a clean droplet from digitalocean.com with Centos 7 installed. I think a droplet is something like a VPS. You have an IP, and SSH access
After some headache I managed to successfully install laravel using composer. I have also installed mysql and apache(httpd)
Now I have
/var/www/laravel
folder, with the installation of the latest Laravel (5.3)
I went inside /var/www/ and called
composer create-project laravel/laravel mypro
Now, I have a laravel app scheleton of a new application at
/var/www/mypro
I would like to access it from a browser so I can start working on it, but I do not know what I need to do. There are many tutorials on how to do that but they are very confusing for me.
What must I do next in order to be able to see the results of what I am working on?
If , in the browser, I access now the droplet by IP, like
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
I get
Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Same if I add to the URL the name of my app like
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mypro
I believe I must configure the httpd ? Or maybe move the project's folder somewhere else?
I tried moving my project folder inside /var/www/html folder, so
/var/www/html/mypro
and now when I try to access the url I receive an empty page (view-source of the browser page returns also an empty page)
I even tried
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mypro/server.php
since there is a server.php file in the root of my project folder... same result
I even added a conf to the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ folder called mypro.conf where I added these lines:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mypro
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/mypro/public"
<Directory /var/www/html/mypro/public>
AllowOverride all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Nothing new happens
I did "service httpd restart" everytime a changed something.
I even tried
php artisan serve --host xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx --port 8000
and tried the url http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8000
Now I get "Unable to connect" page from the browser so I stopped the "serve"
What is it that I have to do in order to be able to finally start working?

Answer 1

Following is way how i do it on Ubutnu 16.04 (It can be done with some changes on Centos).
Update your package repo.
sudo apt update
Update packeges.
sudo apt dist-upgrade
Install PHP
apt install php
Install apache2
apt install apache2
Install PHP Plugins
apt install php-mbstring php-pdo php-tokenizer php-xml php-mcrypt php-gd libapache2-mod-php php-curl php-mysql
Enable mcrypt
phpenmod mcrypt
a2enmod rewrite
Restart Apache Server
service apache2 restart
Install Composer
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
Install Git
apt install git
Install mysql-server
apt install mysql-server
Install Phpmyadmin (Optional)
apt install phpmyadmin
Install zip & unzip
apt install zip unzip
Now create apache virtual host configuration for your website.
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
touch pqr.xyz.com.conf
The basic content of is pqr.xyz.com.conf
#content of pqr.xyz.com.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName pqr.xyz.com
ServerAdmin webmaster#xyz.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/pqr.xyz.com/public
<Directory /var/www/html/pqr.xyz.com>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Now goto /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html/
Create a directory with your website name
mkdir pqr.xyz.com
Now add a user because it is not good idea to work with composer as root while creating laravel project.
adduser admin --ingroup admin
Now make admin as owner of this directory
chown -R admin pqr.xyz.com
Now login as admin
go to /var/www/html
cd /var/www/html
Install Laravel using composer
composer create-project laravel/laravel pqr.xyz.com
cd /var/www/html/pqr.xyz.com
Now your storage and bootstrap directory should have write permission for apache 2 server so make apache owner of these two directories.
chown -R www-data storage
chown -R www-data bootstrap
Now login as root
Activate pqr.xyz.com.conf
a2dissite 000-default.conf
service apache2 reload
a2ensite shopperstock.eveningx.com.conf
service apache2 reload
service apache2 restart
It may not be the best way to work with any larave project , So feel free to comment or suggest an edit.