Best Practices for Deploying Laravel Applications to Production

When you are ready to deploy your Laravel application to a production environment, make sure to follow several important practices to keep the application running efficiently.

Server Configuration

Nginx

If you plan to host the application on an Nginx server, you can start with the following configuration file, which may need to be customized for your specific setup.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /example.com/public;

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    index index.html index.htm index.php;
    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }

    error_page 404 /index.php;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known)\* {
        deny all;
    }
}

Improvements

Autoloader Optimization

When preparing for production, optimize Composer's class autoload map so that Composer can quickly locate and load the required classes.

composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev

Tip: Besides optimizing the autoloader, make sure the composer.lock file is committed to your repository; this speeds up dependency installation.

Configuration Cache

During deployment, run the Artisan config:cache command to merge all Laravel configuration files into a single cached file, dramatically reducing the number of filesystem accesses when loading configuration values.

php artisan config:cache

Note: After caching, the .env file is not loaded, and any calls to the env() function will return null . Ensure that env() is used only inside configuration files.

Route Cache

For large applications with many routes, run the Artisan route:cache command during deployment to compile all routes into a single cached method call, improving route registration performance. php artisan route:cache This command consolidates all route definitions into one cached file, speeding up the handling of hundreds of routes.