Laravel in Kubernetes Part 1 - Installing Laravel

This series will show you how to go from laravel new to Laravel running in Kubernetes, including monitoring, logging, exposing and bunch more.

Part 1 of this series covers creating a new laravel installation which we can deploy in Kubernetes.

TLDR;

Prerequisites

Docker running locally.

We will be using Laravel sail to run our application locally as a start, but will build our own Docker images as we go through.

Why ?

Productionising our Docker images for a smaller size
We need multiple images for things like fpm and nginx when we move toward running in Kubernetes
For existing applications which do not have sail as part of their version < 8.0
Learning

Install a new Laravel application

Change directory to where you want the new application installed.

Install a new Laravel application. For full documentation see here https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/installation#your-first-laravel-project

We will be installing only our app, Redis, and Mysql as part of this post, as we will not be using the rest just yet, and can add them later if necessary.

# Mac OS
curl -s "https://laravel.build/laravel-in-kubernetes?with=mysql,redis" | bash
cd laravel-in-kubernetes
./vendor/bin/sail up

# Linux
curl -s https://laravel.build/laravel-in-kubernetes?with=mysql,redis | bash
cd laravel-in-kubernetes
./vendor/bin/sail up

It might take a while for your application to come up the first time. This is due to new Docker images being downloaded, built, and started up for most services.

You should be able to reach you application http://localhost

Port mappings

Your service might error when starting due to port mounting with an error similar to

ERROR: for laravel.test  Cannot start service laravel.test: Ports are not available: listen tcp 0.0.0.0:80: bind: address already in use

To solve this you can set the APP_PORT environment variable when running sail up

APP_PORT=8080 ./vendor/bin/sail up

You should now be able to reach the application at http://localhost:8080 or whichever port you chose in APP_PORT

Understanding the docker-compose file

With sail, your application has a docker-compose.yml file in the root directory.

This docker-compose file controls what runs when you run sail up

Sail is essentially an abstraction on top of Docker to more easily manage running Laravel

You can see the underlying details by looking at the docker-compose.yml file, used for running your Laravel application locally, and the ./vendor/laravel/sail/runtimes/8.0/Dockerfile file, building the container which runs Laravel.

Commit changes

Let's commit our changes at this point, so we can revert anything in future.

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial Laravel Install"

Adding authentication

For our application, we want at least a little bit of functionality, so we'll use Laravel Breeze to add a login and register pages.

./vendor/bin/sail composer require laravel/breeze --dev
./vendor/bin/sail php artisan breeze:install
./vendor/bin/sail npm install
./vendor/bin/sail npm run dev
./vendor/bin/sail php artisan migrate

Now you can head over to http://localhost:8080/register to see your new register page.

Fill out the form, submit, and if everything works correctly, you should see a logged in dashboard

Commit again

git add .
git commit -m "Add breeze authentication"

Running tests

You can also run the test suite using

./vendor/bin/sail artisan test

Next, we want to start moving our Laravel application closer to Kubernetes. We will build a bunch of Docker images and update our docker-compose to reflect a more production ready installation.