Install Custom laravel 4 Application to OpenShift

Step by step tutorial of how to install laravel 4 with MySQL database on OpenShift

OpenShift is a cloud computing platform as a service product from redhat .

This product is much like Amazon Elastic beans or Google App Engine.

To understand this tutorial you have to know

GIT Version Control

Linux and SSH

Knowledge about Cloud Hosting

What you will get from this tutorial?

Install Laravel Application with MySQL database from GIT repository (Bit bucket)

Note: we did this tutorial using windows machine, if you use Linux you may skip some

parts.

Let's Start :)

Login to your OpenShift dashboard

Click Add Application

Search For PHP and choose PHP 5.4 as in this image

in this step you will choose your application name and domain name as in this image

This step will allow you choose whether you want to scale your application with traffic or

not , this is very useful option as open shift will scale your application automatically to

handle your traffic using your free three gears , Please note if you didn't choose to scale

your application at this point you can't modify this later for this application .

Setup your public key (Paste it) , you can skip this part and use OpenShift RHC client

tool to setup it for you automatically

Here you can clone repository to your local machine, do your changes, commit and push

it directly to OpenShift , this is most practical example and I would prefer this model but

as I mentioned earlier in this tutorial we will use BitBucket repository as for me myself I

use it as primary GIT code repository , other may use GITHUB or any other similar tool ,

these steps apply to all :)

Click Continue to the application overview page so we can add MySQL cartridge and get

SSH Link

To connect Your OpenShift Gear you need Putty SSH Client and PuttyGen to convert

your private key from pub to PPK so it will work with putty , you can download booth

tools from Putty SSH site

Convert your private key, it's located under your name in windows users folder inside

.SSH folder. (It will be there after you use RHC client)

As in above picture import your key and hit (Save private key) button to convert it.

Put your SSH link as in this image and don't forget to remove SSH from its start

After that click Auth. and choose your private key from previous step then hit open, you

will have message ask you to accept certificate, hit Yes

if everything ok you will get screen like this

Change your current directory to app-root directory inside this you will find repo directory

this is where you should put your application code , as for now it have one PHP file

called index,php

back to your laravel application open app/config/database.php and do this changes:

For host 'host' => getenv('OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_HOST'),

and important add another config array element called port

'port' => getenv('OPENSHIFT_MYSQL_DB_PORT'),

this is important and if you forgot it your MySQL connection will not work , and for

database user and password you can get them from openshift application dashboard .

Back to your SSH session run this command rm -rf repo this will delete repo folder

content and throw permeation denied exception to you , don't worry it's ok :)

From your current directory app-root run git clone repo_url repo (replace repo_url with

your repository https clone url) , so this will clone your repository with predefined

configuration from previous step to your machine .

Openshift gear comes with Composer pre-installed , if you did run composer update and

got any error like memory error or something similar then you have to download your

custom version of composer and run update against it .

To do this use this command

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --quiet --install-dir=$OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR

This will quietly install composer after that you can run

php $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/composer.phar update

or whatever composer command you want !

Last step run ln -s public php this will create symbolic link from laravel public folder to

php as redhat central apache server search this location for your app.

Now everything should run smoothly, if anything goes wrong please post comment

below.