Deploy Laravel to Vercel

Easy, Free, Serverless Laravel With Vercel

First in your existing project create this file api/index.php

<?php

// Forward Vercel requests to normal index.php
require __DIR__ . '/../public/index.php';

Vercel only allows an app’s entry-point to live inside the api directory, then we have to set up a simple script to forward to Laravel’s normal public/index.php entry-point

Create file .vercelignore to ignore vendor dir when deployed

/vendor

Create file vercel.json, the explanation is here

{
    "version": 2,
    "framework": null,
    "builds": [
        {
            "src": "/api/index.php",
            "use": "vercel-php@0.6.2"
        },
        {
            "src": "/public/build/assets/**",
            "use": "@vercel/static"
        },
        {
            "src": "/public/**",
            "use": "@vercel/static"
        }
    ],
    "routes": [
        {
            "src": "/build/assets/(.*)",
            "dest": "/public/build/assets/$1"
        },
        {
            "src": "/favicon.ico",
            "headers": {
                "Content-Type": "image/x-icon"
            },
            "dest": "/public/favicon.ico"
        },
        {
            "src": "/(.*)",
            "dest": "/api/index.php"
        }
    ],
    "outputDirectory": "public",
    "env": {
        "APP_NAME": "Your App Name",
        "APP_ENV": "production",
        "APP_DEBUG": "false",
        "APP_URL": "https://laravel-app.vercel.app",

        "LOG_CHANNEL": "stderr",
        "CACHE_DRIVER": "array",
        "SESSION_DRIVER": "array",

        "APP_CONFIG_CACHE": "/tmp/config.php",
        "APP_EVENTS_CACHE": "/tmp/events.php",
        "APP_PACKAGES_CACHE": "/tmp/packages.php",
        "APP_ROUTES_CACHE": "/tmp/routes.php",
        "APP_SERVICES_CACHE": "/tmp/services.php",
        "VIEW_COMPILED_PATH": "/tmp"
    }
}

vercel-php is a community-built PHP runtime for Vercel functions. It does all the hard work for us like installing the proper dependencies and running composer install. Please change this vercel-php@0.6.2 version refer to this link https://github.com/vercel-community/php adjust it according with your php version

Change APP_URL with your prefered domain name, this will be setted as your production domain.

You can change CACHE_DRIVER or SESSION_DRIVER using redis.

For more sensitive environment variables like APP_KEY or anything that you dont want people to know it, you can visit the vercel Environment Variables tab in your project’s Settings:

Install Vercel CLI

Install in your local machine, check this link

run vercel login and follow the instruction

to deploy in preview mode, run

vercel deploy

when finished you can click the preview link provided from vercel

to deploy in preview production mode, run

vercel --prod

when finished you can click the production link provided from vercel

Summary

This makes it incredibly easy to deploy apps to vercel even if we use php and laravel

Because Vercel is serverless, your database has to be hosted on a separate cloud platform.

To link your database with Vercel is actually easy you just need to update the Environment Variables in vercel.json or in vercel project’s Settings.