Multiple Laravel apps on a single Nginx server

Following up on my video Deploy Laravel on an Ubuntu Nginx server, this guide will cover running multiple Laravel applications on the same Nginx server using unique domains.

To demonstrate, I have two Laravel applications running on a server in these directories:

• /var/www/demo1 - We’ll call this application Demo1
• /var/www/demo2 - We’ll call this application Demo2

Set up apps

Following the instructions from the Deploy Laravel on Ubuntu Nginx server guide, I have already completed the following steps:

• Readied the server to run Laravel applications
  • Made sure the server had all the required PHP modules
  • Installed Composer
• Set up the Laravel applications
  • Cloned them from Github
  • Ran composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev to download all the outside dependencies
  • Created a .env file
  • Set appropriate permissions on the storage and bootstrap/cache directories

All that is left to do is set up the Nginx site configs and configure the domains.

Nginx site configs

For each of the sites you’re setting up, you'll create a Nginx site config file in the directory /etc/nginx/sites-available/ using the template config provided below.

In my example, I’ll create:

• /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo1.conf
• /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo2.conf

Within this template, you need to update the values server_name and root as appropriate for your project. Also, make sure the line fastcgi_pass references the version of PHP that is running on your server (php8.2-fpm.sock is used in this example).

Site config template:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name demoX.com;
    root /var/www/demoX/public;
 
    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
 
    index index.php;
 
    charset utf-8;
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }
 
    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
 
    error_page 404 /index.php;
 
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
 
    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

To enable the above configs, you need to symbolically link the files created in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled. E.g.:

> ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo1.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

> ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/demo2.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

Run this command to make sure there are no errors with the configs:

> nginx -t

Restart Nginx to make the changes take effect:

> systemctl restart nginx

Configuring the domain

With the above setup in place, the next step is to configure the domains I want to use for these sites to point to the IP address of the server where they’re running.

For the purposes of the demonstration, I will configure a domain I own of hesweb.xyz to point to the Demo1 application, and I will use a subdomain of demo.codewithsusan.com to point to the Demo2 application.

Test it

After saving the above settings and waiting a minute or two for the changes to propagate, I was able to load the individual sites on their respective domains: