How to Deploy / Upload Laravel, Vue, InertiaJs, Tailwind Project in cPanel

In this article, you will learn how to Deploy/ Upload your Laravel Project on cPanel. If you make your project with Vue3, Inertiajs, vite, and Tailwindcss you can easily build your project development to production.

Server Requirements for Laravel 11

The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum PHP version and extensions:

PHP >= 8.2
Ctype PHP Extension
cURL PHP Extension
DOM PHP Extension
Fileinfo PHP Extension
Filter PHP Extension
Hash PHP Extension
Mbstring PHP Extension
OpenSSL PHP Extension
PCRE PHP Extension
PDO PHP Extension
Session PHP Extension
Tokenizer PHP Extension
XML PHP Extension

1. Ready Laravel Project to Upload on Cpanel

First, we need to build vue.js, tailwindcss, assets with npm. Just open your project with your code editor and run these commands.

Storage folder making public:
To make the storage folder accessible from the web, you should create a symbolic link from public/storage. Run the following command in your project:

php artisan storage:link

Build Your Vue.js Assets:
Run the following command in your project’s root directory to build your Vue 3 assets:

npm run build

Optimize Laravel:
Run the following command to optimize Laravel for production:

php artisan optimize:clear

Compress Your Project:
Compress your project files into a .zip file except node_mouldes folder.
Export your Database .sql file from phpMyAdmin. We will import it from our cPanel.

deploy laravel inertia vue project on cpanel

2. Upload Your Project to cPanel

Upload the .zip File:
Log in to your cPanel account, go to the File Manager, and upload the .zip file to your desired directory (usually public_html or a subdirectory within it). Then Extract the zip file.
Extract the .zip File:
In the public_html folder you will get all Laravel files like that.

Then open the public folder inside the public_html or your root folder.

Move the content of public directory into public_html(but don’t delete the empty public folder which is inside the public_html folder)

3. Folder Permissions

Ensure that the storage and bootstrap/cache directories are writable by the web server:
Storage Folder Permission

Cache Folder Permission

4. Configure Environment Variables

Edit the .env File:
Open the .env file in your extracted project and update the database credentials and any other necessary environment variables to match your cPanel setup.

APP_NAME=Tech Trigger
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_URL=https://your-domain.com

5. Set Up the Database

Create a New Database:
In cPanel, go to MySQL Databases and create a new database, user, and password.
Import the Database:
Use phpMyAdmin in cPanel to import your database file (.sql) into the newly created database.

Update .env File:
Update your .env file with the database name, username, and password.

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE="database_name"
DB_USERNAME="user"
DB_PASSWORD="password"

6. Update the index.php

We need to update index.php file inside the public_html directory like this:

See inside the index.php file

7. Set Up Apache .htaccess

Create .htaccess File:
Ensure that the .htaccess file in your public_html or root directory contains the following to redirect all requests to index.php:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    <IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
        Options -MultiViews -Indexes
    </IfModule>
    RewriteEngine On
    # Handle Authorization Header
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} .
    RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
    # Redirect Trailing Slashes If Not A Folder...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
    RewriteRule ^ %1 [L,R=301]
    # Send Requests To Front Controller...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>