Preparing a Laravel Project for Production

Moving a Laravel application from local development to a live production server involves more than just uploading files — a handful of steps keep it secure and running smoothly.

Pre-Deployment Checklist

• Set APP_ENV=production and APP_DEBUG=false in .env
• Generate a fresh, strong APP_KEY if one hasn't been set
• Run composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
• Run production asset builds (npm run production or npm run build)
• Run outstanding database migrations

File Permissions

chmod -R 775 storage bootstrap/cache

The storage and bootstrap/cache directories need to be writable by the web server process.

Queue and Scheduler in Production

Production deployments typically run queue workers under a process manager like Supervisor, and rely on the system cron entry for schedule:run covered earlier in this course.

HTTPS and Security Headers

Production traffic should be served over HTTPS, with Laravel's URL generation forced to https using URL::forceScheme('https') if needed behind a load balancer.

Getting these basics right sets the stage for two more focused production topics: managing environment configuration safely, and caching for performance.