How to deploy Laravel 4 Apps on Heroku?

Question

I know that Heroku supports many different environments in the Cedar stack including PHP .
The tipical folder structure of a Laravel 4 app is the following:

app/
bootstrap/
public/
    packages/
    index.php
vendor/
composer.json
phpunit.xml

Note 2 things:

1. The main index.php file is not located in the root, is under the public folder.

2. There is a composer.json file and Heroku needs to install all the project dependencies automatically just like gems in Ruby apps.

So my question is:
Is there a way to deploy this kind of apps on Heroku ??

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

You'll need to use a custom buildpack to set the document root and executes a script that integrates composer too. In Heroku's Buidlpack you would need to update the bin/compile script to handle composer and conf/httpd.conf to set the document root. Also, Heroku's buildpack does not have mcrypt compiled in, so Laravel 4 won't work with that buildpack. I've included many updates that include mcrypt, composer, and custom document roots in my branch of the buildpack .

Answer 2

Heroku has recently released a official PHP buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php . It's new and i had some initial troubles with it. but it should improve. It supports PHP or HHVM.

Answer 3

Its possible to specify your application's entry point in an Procfile, place it in in the root directory of your application. In your case the contents would be:

web: vendor/bin/heroku-php-apache2 public/

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-php#define-a-procfile