Deploy a Laravel app on cPanel hosting

Laravel runs well on cPanel hosting with LiteSpeed and a current PHP version. The key point is that only Laravel's public folder should be reachable from the web; everything else, including .env with your secrets, must stay outside the document root. This guide walks through a clean deployment.

Before you start

• SSH or Terminal access for Composer and Artisan commands.
• A PHP version supported by your Laravel release, selected in MultiPHP Manager, with extensions such as mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, xml, ctype, fileinfo and bcmath enabled.
• A MySQL database and user: create them.

Put the code outside public_html

• With Git: clone into ~/apps/myapp using Git Version Control or git clone in Terminal.
• Without Git: upload a ZIP of the project (without vendor and node_modules) to ~/apps/myapp and extract it in File Manager.

Point the domain to the public folder

1. Open cPanel → Domains → Domains.
2. For an addon domain or subdomain, click Manage and set the Document Root to apps/myapp/public, then save.
3. For the primary domain, whose root is fixed to public_html, either host the app on a subdomain, or replace public_html with a symlink in Terminal after backing it up:
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   mv ~/public_html ~/public_html.bak && ln -s ~/apps/myapp/public ~/public_html

Install dependencies and configure

cd ~/apps/myapp

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

cp .env.example .env && php artisan key:generate

Edit .env in File Manager:

APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_URL=https://app.example.com
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_DATABASE=cpuser_app
DB_USERNAME=cpuser_appuser
DB_PASSWORD=your-password

Then run:

php artisan migrate --force

php artisan storage:link

php artisan config:cache && php artisan route:cache && php artisan view:cache

Build front-end assets

Run npm run build on your computer and upload the public/build folder. Building with Node on shared hosting uses a lot of memory and can hit resource limits.

Scheduler and queues

• Add a cron job every minute:
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  cd /home/cpuser/apps/myapp && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

• Long-running queue:work processes are not suitable for shared hosting. Use QUEUE_CONNECTION=database and process jobs from the scheduler with queue:work --stop-when-empty.

Permissions

storage and bootstrap/cache must be writable by your user; 755 folders and 644 files are enough because PHP runs as your account. Never use 777.

Troubleshooting

• 500 error, blank page: read storage/logs/laravel.log and the error log. Missing APP_KEY and cached config are common causes; run php artisan config:clear.
• 404 on every route except /: the document root is not the public folder, or its .htaccess is missing.
• Composer out of memory: run composer install locally and upload vendor, or contact support.

Next steps

• Automate deployments with Git
• Enable PHP extensions