Guidance to setup ec2 instance to host production web service by apache + laravel

5 min readMar 23, 2022

Introduction

The primary scope of my current job is to focusing on frontend development. Recently I have a opportunity to be a consultant to help a sibling company to enhance their e-commerce product. That’s the reason why I start from scratch to setup an ec2 instance to host the web service.

NOTE: if you are interested in how to setup a development environment, this might helps: https://stanely01.medium.com/build-up-a-laravel-development-environment-by-vagrant-3e46ca0ddff1

Techs involved

Actually the sibling company didn’t take much fancy techs, the following are the techs involved in the e-commerce product:

EC2 service of AWS
Maria DB, It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source
Laravel, a MVC web framework based on php
Apache, an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems
https setup by Let’s encrypt

The detailed steps will be specified in the below sections

Create EC2 instance

The fundamental step is to create the ec2 instance to install and setup all techs required.

access https://ap-southeast-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home
click new instance
select AMI Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM) - Kernel 4.14, SSD Volume Type 64-bit (x86), click select
choose instance type t3.small and click Review and Launch. Actually you can choose the type you prefer.
The wizard will warn you to setup the security group, click to setup it up
ensure port 22 (ssh), 80 (http), and 443 (https) are allowed in the security group. You can also restrict the request for certain IPs for security purpose.
Launch the instance
The wizard ask you to create a key pair. Create one and download it. NOTE: It’s very important to download and keep the key securely because there is no other entry to download it again.
Then, you can find the instance you just setup in the aws console
Verify the ssh connection by the IP assigned and the key you just downloaded, for example:

ssh ec2-user@<the ip of instance> -i <key downloaded>.pem

welcome to onboard the instance
update yum libraries in the instance

sudo yum update -y

ensure your instance is assigned a static ip by elastic ip
create a domain by aws route 53 to redirect the requests to the elastic ip, ensure the domain name you created is updated into the virtual host file we create above

Setup Maria DB

update the yum repo to install stable release of maria db

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/mariadb.repo<<EOF
[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/10.5/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1
EOF

it’s time to install maria db service

sudo yum makecache 
sudo yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client -y
sudo systemctl enable --now mariadb

verify it by cli

sudo mysql

If you switch maria db cli, it’s installed succesfully
change the password of user root to access the db, here you get to type the command inside maria db cli

SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('mypassword');

you can change the password to anyone you like, ensure it’s copied to the .env of the laravel project
create the database by maria db cli

create database mydb;

you can change the database name as well, and ensure it’s copied to the .env file.

Setup Laravel

install php7.4

sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.4
sudo yum clean metadata
yum install php php-mbstring php-zip php-cli php-pdo php-fpm php-json php-mysqlnd php-xml

install composer of php

composer is the library management of php eco-system.

cd ~
php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
sudo php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

install nodejs

Yes, nodejs is required because we have laravel mix which is a mix way to implement ui by both templates and FE frameworks / libraries.

Here we adopt n to install nodejs

cd ~
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tj/n/master/bin/n -o n
sudo bash n lts
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/node /usr/lib/node
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/npm /usr/bin/npm
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/node-waf /usr/bin/node-waf

prepare the project

clone the laravel project by github repo or any other mechanisms you prefer

cd ~
https://github.com/mygit/myproject.git

copy the project in the cloned repo to the apache working folder

cp -rf myproject /var/www/html/

install laravel (ya, don’t hesitate, you get to use npm as well)

cd /var/www/html/myproject
composer install --ignore-platform-reqs
npm install
npm run production

prepare the .env file, the following variables are necessary

DB_CONNECTION=mysqlDB_HOST=127.0.0.1DB_PORT=3306DB_DATABASE=mydbDB_USERNAME=rootDB_PASSWORD=mypassword

run steps for production

php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate
php artisan db:seed
php artisan passport:install
php artisan view:cache

set permission of the laravel storage folders or the request will be 500 as you make post requests because laravel cannot logs

cd /var/www/html/myproject
chown -R $USER:apache storage
chown -R $USER:apache bootstrap/cache/
chmod -R 775 storage
chmod -R 775 bootstrap/cache

Later we will setup Apache service to host the web service we prepared.

Setup Apache

install apache service

sudo yum install httpd -y 
sudo systemctl enable httpd
setup the permissions of folders

sudo systemctl restart httpd

sudo usermod -a -G apache ec2-user
sudo chown -R ec2-user:apache /var/www
sudo chmod 2775 /var/www
find /var/www -type d -exec sudo chmod 2775 {} \;
find /var/www -type f -exec sudo chmod 0664 {} \;

setup apache virtual host to have our lavavel engine handle the http / https request

About the virtual host, you can think it as we tell apache to know the folders where we host we apps

sudo tee /etc/httpd/conf.d/myweb.conf<<EOF
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/myproject/public"
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    <Directory /var/www/html/myproject/public>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
EOFsudo systemctl restart httpd

Setup https by Let’s Encrypt

A nonprofit Certificate Authority providing TLS certificates to websites. Setting up https is never an easy task. Let’s Encrypt ease the process.

ensure your instance is assigned a static ip by elastic ip
ensure there is a domain name (e.g www.mydomain.com) mapping to the static ip assigned above.
assign the certbot repo by yum

cd ~
sudo wget -r --no-parent -A 'epel-release-*.rpm' https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/
sudo rpm -Uvh dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/epel-release-*.rpm
sudo yum-config-manager --enable epel*
sudo yum install -y certbot python2-certbot-apache

setup https by certbot and answer the questions

sudo certbot

it might take some time to complete the https by certbot, 1 ~ 5 mins
verify https by browser, e.g https://www.mydomain.com

Schedule to renew the ssl

sudo crontab -e// append the following contents
39      1,13    *       *       *       root    certbot renew --no-self-upgrade

Summary

Hopefully this helps you to prepare your proudction server to host Laravel app.