Deploy your Laravel 4 application on Heroku

Heroku is a popular PaaS that allows you to deploy your application’s in no time. But, learning how to do that can be confusing, especially for PHP developers. In this tutorial I’ll cover basic steps which will help you to deploy your Laravel 4 application on Heroku. First let’s download Laravel:

After that, enter in laravel directory:

and initialize new git repository:

Now, create .gitignore file and put everything you want to ignore from git tracking. You can use Laravel’s default .gitignore file, just remove composer.lock from it:

And make a commit:

I assume that you have installed the Heroku Toolbelt, if you don’t have Heroku Toolbelt installed then just look at the install instructions and then continue with this tutorial.

Now, you need to login:

you need to enter your credentials and we’re ready to go. Let’s create our app:

heroku create command is used to create application called shop-up, with region parameter you can select region, stack parameter allows you to select on which stack you want to deploy your application and finally with buildpack parameter we can specify which buildpack we want to use for our application. In this case I used Heroku’s default PHP buildpack, and you can use whatever you want.

After executing this command we get following message:

Now, you just need to  create Heroku Procfile. You need to tell Apache2 web server that document root of your application is public/. Procfile should be placed in the root folder of your application. We just need to add one line to it:

Commmit changes and push you application to heroku repository:

After minute or two, you should get a message that tells you that your application is now deployed to Heroku:

And that’s it. Here is list of some useful commands that you may need:

In the next tutorial I’ll show you how you can add and use PostgreSQL database on your Heroku instance. Stay tuned.