Hosting a Laravel Application on Azure Web App

6 min readJun 11, 2017

This post was born out of the pain I went through while trying to host a Laravel application on Azure for a client who insisted we host all his web apps there, after reading loads of blog posts and stack overflow suggestions i was able to get it running smoothly so i decided to share this knowing it will help someone out there.

I would like to give credit to Peter Katelaan on this blog post which really helped in finding some good answers to some disturbing points in my deployment.

Now lets get into it starting with some prerequisites. Before you proceed you should have and be comfortable with the following:

An Azure Portal Account
Basic understanding of Laravel
Basic understanding of git and remote repositories

You good? Great! Lets get it on.

Step 1: Create a Laravel Application on your local development machine

This can be done easily by running laravel new <app-name> from your terminal

Step 2: Set up your project as a git repo

Run git init within your project root. Then create a remote git repository with your favorite provider (I will be using Bitbucket) and add it as a remote branch to your project by running git remote add <endpoint name> <your git url> .

Now commit some code and push to your remote master branch (or any appropriate branch you have setup for the purpose of the deployment)

Step 3: Create an Azure Web App

Got to the Azure Portal and navigate to New >> Web + Mobile >> Web App

Enter an appropriate name for your web app (Azure will verify in real-time if the name you have chosen is available) and select the Pricing tier (i am using the free tier for this practise)

When, you’re done filling all the appropriate fields, click “OK” at the bottom of the panel, Azure will begin setting up your web app and you will be notified immediately the process is complete

Step 4: Verify your PHP version and Install Composer

Click on your web app and go to the SETTINGS section and click on Application Settings, here you verify that the PHP version on your web app meets the minimum required by the version of Laravel you are running.

If not, change the PHP version and click the Save button to persist your changes.

Then, you need to install composer which is the dependency manager for laravel. To do this, go to the DEVELOPMENT TOOLS section and click on Extensions. From there you click the Add button at the top left-hand corner.

This opens up a blade section from which you can then select Composer, agree to the Terms and Conditions, then click OK to install it.

Step 5: Configure Environment Variables

There is a range of differences between how Azure servers work compared to your typical Apache on Linux servers. One of which is that Azure serves out your web app from its wwwroot unlike public_html on Apache servers. However, Laravel is not a fan of this style so in order to get Laravel to work we need to tweak some settings.

Go to Application Settings, scroll down to App settings and enter SCM_REPOSITORY_PATH with the value ..\repository
Also enter SCM_TARGET_PATH with the value ..
On the same page, go down to Virtual applications and directories and change the public directory value from site\wwwroot to site\public

Step 6: Configure Deployment Settings

Now lets setup the Deployment option. Go to the DEPLOYMENT section and click on Deployment Options. Select your Remote Git Provider (Note, you can also deploy directly from your local git repo), so i select Bitbucket and authorize it by entering my username and password.

Then, you select the repo and the branch you have setup as your deployment branch (I am selecting the master branch) and click Ok.

(Almost) Immediately, you will see your first commit being deployed.

Step 7: Add a web.config file

As .htaccess is to Apache so is web.config to IIS which is the server Azure is using. Thus the .htaccess file that comes with your laravel app (in the public directory) will not work. So go into your public folder, create a web.config file and paste in the content below:

<?xml version=”1.0" encoding=”utf-8"?> 
<configuration> 
 <system.webServer>
 <urlCompression doDynamicCompression=”true” doStaticCompression=”true” dynamicCompressionBeforeCache=”true”/>
 <staticContent>
 <remove fileExtension=”.svg” />
 <mimeMap fileExtension=”.svg” mimeType=”image/svg+xml” />
 <mimeMap fileExtension=”.woff” mimeType=”application/font-woff” />
 <clientCache httpExpires=”Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT” cacheControlMode=”UseExpires” />
 </staticContent>
 <httpProtocol>
 <customHeaders>
 <add name=”Strict-Transport-Security” value=”max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains”/>
 <add name=”Access-Control-Allow-Origin” value=”*” />
 <add name=”Access-Control-Allow-Headers” value=”X-Requested-With,Content-Type” />
 <add name=”Access-Control-Allow-Methods” value=”POST,GET,OPTIONS,DELETE,PUT,PATCH” />
 </customHeaders>
 </httpProtocol>
 <rewrite>
 <rules>
 <rule name=”Laravel5" stopProcessing=”true”>
 <match url=”^” ignoreCase=”false” />
 <conditions logicalGrouping=”MatchAll”>
 <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsDirectory” negate=”true” />
 <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsFile” negate=”true” />
 </conditions>
 <action type=”Rewrite” url=”index.php” appendQueryString=”true” />
 </rule>
 </rules>
 </rewrite>
 </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Commit and push this change to your remote branch and Azure automatically deploys it.

Step 8 (Final): Add your .env file

One important thing to note (and boy did this skip my mind) is that the .gitignore file that comes with your Laravel app ignores your .env file by default (for very good reasons one of which is to have different environment settings for your local and production environments).

Thus you need to add one in your production environment. Now don`t make make the mistake of removing it from one of the ignored files in .gitignore . Azure provides an app management console known as the Kudu Console which provides you loads of awesome tools to manage your web app. Simply navigate to it by going to https://<app-name>.scm.azurewebsites.net , for me that will be https://laravel-azure-app.scm.azurewebsites.net

From the top menu, go to Debug Console >> CMD , there you will see an FTP-like interface for your folder structure and below it is command-line interface (yeah, i know right) which is just awesome.

From the folder structure interface, click on the site folder. Then from the command line, simply create the .env file and copy the contents from .env.example by running the following command:

copy .env.example .env

This then creates your .env file, but wait, we ain’t done yet. Just a lil more edit to go.

Open your .env file by clicking the edit icon beside it

Then from the local version of your .env file, copy your APP_KEY and paste it in your production version. Also, change the APP_URL to that of your azure web app.

Phewww! Now we are done. We can now unveil our app. Simply go to the address of your app (for me that will be: http://laravel-azure-app.azurewebsites.net) and you will see your app Live and Robust. Wonderful!!!