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Php versions – Having trouble deploying Laravel site to Bluehost subdomain

[Update: At this point, I have been able to resolve all my deployment problems but one. The most recent one is that I had an Access denied for user 'bob'@'localhost' (using password: YES) error whenever I attempted to access a route that required a db connection. The problem arises from using cPanel on Bluehost with shared hosting. The way that cPanel handles this is to prefix your database name and your user names with characters 2-9 of your domain name plus an underscore character. So, for example, my neighborhood database was actually called obertrod_neighborhood, and the user name bob was actually obertrod_bob. When I altered the DB_DATABASE and DB_USERNAME values in the .env file to reflect this, I got access to the database.]

I have been over a number of posts where someone was attempting to deploy a Laravel site to bluehost. While it seems like plenty of people have had difficulty deploying Laravel to Bluehost, I haven’t found any posts that appear to address my specific situation.

  1. I have a fully working site that I developed on my own machine. I use php artisan serve to fire up localhost:8000. On my browser, navigating to localhost:8000 fires up the landing page, which is exposed as a / route. All the other routes (e.g. /users) run as expected.
  2. The site’s routes access a MySQL datbase. I didn’t use migrations. I created the database directly on my machine with MySQL Workbench.
  3. Bluehost subdomain is neighborhood.robertrodes.com.
  4. An index.html file that prints "test" to the screen runs correctly on the subdomain, so the subdomain itself is in working order.
  5. I created the MySQL database on the Bluehost subdomain by dumping my local database to a .sql file, uploading it, and using phpMyAdmin to run the file. The database appears to be in working order; the schema is correct and I’m able to use phpMyAdmin to perform all CRUD operations without issue.
  6. I first tried installing the Laravel framework using Bluehost’s softacular service, and uploading all the model, views, controllers, routes and css files to the appropriate folders. I was able to get the landing page to display (the / route), but all the other routes give a 404 error after the site reroutes to public.
  7. I tried not using the Bluehost installation, and just copying all of my files from the localhost version to the blank subdomain. This one sometimes comes up 403 forbidden, and sometimes reroutes to neighborhood/robertrodes.com/public/public (go figure) and responds with a 404 error. [Edit: This was a problem with caching. Now the site shows a test value correctly, and the main landing page navigating to the public folder from the URL.]
  8. The current state of the subdomain is that the local version of the site resides in the root folder of the subdomain.

Looks like I’m in over my head, and Bluehost doesn’t support Laravel. I haven’t been able to find anything relevant in the Laravel doc, either. Can someone give me a hand troubleshooting this?

In particular, I suspect that I have some files that are pointing things to wrong places. If I could get clear on where the files are that handle configurations and where to find things I can probably fix it from there.

For example, I can’t find a file where requests to neighborhood.robertrodes.com get redirected to neighborhood.robertrodes.com/public/public (that’s what happens). [Edit: not any more. This was a caching problem, resolved by clearing the cache.] There isn’t a .php file in the root folder. In the public folder, index.php doesn’t have the word public in it.

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  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    In the end, this boiled down to two problems:

    1. All of my routes are designed to reroute URL requests from /[route] to /public/[route]. This works fine on my dev site, using php artisan serve and localhost:8000/[route]. But was not happening when deploying to my bluehost domain; any attempts to access a route resulted in a 404 error.

    2. Attempts to access data from the associated MySQL database resulted in the error Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES).

    Resolutions are as follows:

    1. Created an .htaccess file (a file with Apache commands that gets run on access) in subdomain's root directory. The file contains the following code:

      <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

      The RewriteRule has the syntax RewriteRule WhatToRewrite WhatToWriteItTo. This one uses regular expressions and supports $1 to refer to capture groups. So, ^(.*)$ captures the entire URL string (after the domain), and then plugs it into $1 in the second expression, thereby prefixing a public/ to each URL. (E.g. https://neighborhood.robertrodes.com/users gets rewritten as https://neighborhood.robertrodes.com/public/users.

    2. On Bluehost shared hosting, database names and database user names are preceded with the cPanel user name, which is characters 2-9 of the domain name. So, my cPanel name is obertrod. Therefore, database name neighborhood becomes obertrod_neighborhood, and user name root becomes obertrod_root. I added the superuser bob (could have stuck with root, but), and then changed two values in the root's .env file as follows:

      DB_DATABASE=obertrod_neighborhood
DB_USERNAME=obertrod_bob

    Things I tried for problem 1 before finding the .htaccess solution:

    1. Writing an index.php file in the root with this code:

      <?php
 header("Location: https://neighborhood.robertrodes.com/public" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
?>

      This rerouted any GET requests to the public folder, but POST requests wouldn't work until I changed the action attribute in my <form> tags to include public. It also changed the URL displaying in the browser to include the public directory.

    2. Attempting to add a symlink. This got a bit interesting, because shared hosting on Bluehost doesn't allow use of a terminal. (Attempting to open a terminal provides the helpful Error: The WebSocket handshake failed at XX:XX:XX XM. Pushing the Reconnect button repeats the error. So you contact support, wait until they get to you, and have them tell you you can't use Terminal because you have a shared connection. Not my favorite Bluehost feature.)

      I tried putting the command ln -s public_html/neighborhood/public_html/neighborhood/public in a Cron job. No effect as far as I could see. I tried reversing target and link, also with no effect. I tried creating and running a symlink.php file with the symlink command and various target and link arguments, all to no avail.

    I suspect that figuring out the right parameters for the symlink might work, but I'm actually glad I couldn't get it working, because .htaccess rewrite rules are clearly the right way to reroute these requests.


  2. 0

    I have one website deployed to Bluehost, simply copy your files to the server and create a symlink to the /public folder.

    So, to do that:

    1. Move the public_html folder to a new one (just for backup): mv public_html public_html_bak
    2. Create a symlink that points public_html to your Laravel public folder:
      ln -s your_laravel_folder/public public_html

    Don’t forget to set the correct domain name in your .env file, create an app key, composer install and all the usual Laravel deployment commands.

    Since you are deploying to a subdomain, your public_html may be different. Adjust the folder paths to whatever Bluehost created as a landing folder for that domain.

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