Installing a Laravel app on Heroku

(This is part of a series of posts on Laravel on Heroku. Check back soon for more.)

1. Installing a Laravel app on Heroku
2. Laravel on Heroku - Using a MySQL database
3. Laravel on Heroku - Using a PostgreSQL database
4. Laravel on Heroku - Using a Buildpack locally to mimic your Heroku environment (Nginx)

Heroku has had PHP support for a while, but it's been a definitively second-class citizen. Yesterday Heroku announced a huge boost in their PHP support, including out-of-the-box Composer support and an intention to become a legitimate destination for hosting modern PHP apps.

So, let's take a look at the fastest and simplest way to get a stock Laravel install up and running on Heroku.

Pre-requisite: #

Sign up for a Heroku account and install the Heroku toolbelt, a command-line toolkit for managing your Heroku apps.

Create the project #

However you prefer, get your Laravel project initialized.

$ laravel new laravel-heroku
$ cd laravel-heroku

Add your Procfile #

Heroku knows which processes to run for your app based on a configuration file called a Procfile. The default apache2 process (if you don't use a Procfile) points to the web root, not to /public... so we need to create a custom Procfile to serve the site from /public.

Add a file with the name Procfile (capitalization matters) that contains this line:

web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 public

(more details: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-php-settings#setting-the-document-root)

IMPORTANT: Heroku has made some changes recently, and you will likely have to run the following code in order for your Heroku app to detect that it's PHP: heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php. Thanks Jason McCallister!

Initialize the git repo #

OK, our code is ready to go. Let's get it into git.

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit of stock Laravel install."

Create the Heroku app #

Since you have the Heroku Toolbelt installed, you can create and modify your apps directly from the command line.

$ heroku create

The output/prompt should look something like this:

± heroku create
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: [enter]
Password (typing will be hidden): [enter]
Creating app-name-here... done, stack is cedar
http://app-name-here.herokuapp.com/ | git@heroku.com:app-name-here.git
Git remote heroku added

Write down or just remember the "app-name-here"; this is the unique identifier for the Heroku app you just created. The app will run on the Heroku Cedar stack by default.

Deploy your code to the Heroku app #

With Heroku, you push new code to your site by pushing to the heroku git remote.

$ git push heroku master

Look for this at the end: 

----> Launching... done, v3
       http://app-name-here.herokuapp.com/ deployed to Heroku

Celebrate! #

Check it: 

Notes #

Heroku's PHP support is not the only thing that has gotten an upgrade; their PHP support documentation is now fantastic. Check it out for many more tutorials and much more in-depth introductions. Heroku - Getting Started With PHP

Postscript #

2015/10/28: I haven't run this recently, but I've heard from a few folks that we need an extra step or two. The first is that you need to log into Heroku and add a config variable for APP_KEY, and set it to any 32-character-long string.

If you have any issues with this walkthrough, please let me know on Twitter so i can keep this up-to-date. Thanks!

from : https://mattstauffer.co/blog/installing-a-laravel-app-on-heroku