How to Deploy Laravel 11 on Contabo Ubuntu 24.04 VPS with Nginx, PHP 8.3 & Redis Queue

The Power of Laravel 11 on Dedicated Virtual Hardware

Laravel 11 is the most popular modern PHP web framework, celebrated for its elegant syntax, robust ORM (Eloquent), and powerful ecosystem (Breeze, Jetstream, Horizon, Pulse). While PaaS platforms charge hundreds of dollars for memory-capped instances, deploying Laravel directly on a Contabo Cloud VPS unlocks immense compute and memory for high-throughput background queues and database caching.

Step 1: Installing PHP 8.3, Nginx, and Extensions

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php -y
sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y nginx php8.3-fpm php8.3-mysql php8.3-curl php8.3-mbstring \
  php8.3-xml php8.3-bcmath php8.3-zip php8.3-redis php8.3-intl php8.3-gd git unzip

Step 2: Installing Composer Globally

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
composer --version

Step 3: Cloning Repository and Configuring Permissions

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/my-laravel-app
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data /var/www/my-laravel-app
cd /var/www/my-laravel-app

git clone https://github.com/YourUsername/your-laravel-repo.git .
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

# Set required permissions for storage and bootstrap cache
sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R 775 storage bootstrap/cache

Step 4: Configuring Nginx Virtual Host

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/app.yourdomain.com

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name app.yourdomain.com;
    root /var/www/my-laravel-app/public;
    index index.php;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.3-fpm.sock;
    }

    location ~ /\. {
        deny all;
    }
}

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/app.yourdomain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d app.yourdomain.com

Step 5: Setting Up Queue Worker with Supervisor

Ensure Laravel background jobs (emails, notifications, video processing) run continuously without termination:

sudo apt install -y supervisor
sudo nano /etc/supervisor/conf.d/laravel-worker.conf

[program:laravel-worker]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=php /var/www/my-laravel-app/artisan queue:work redis --sleep=3 --tries=3 --max-time=3600
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=www-data
numprocs=4
redirect_stderr=true
stdout_logfile=/var/www/my-laravel-app/storage/logs/worker.log

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update
sudo supervisorctl start laravel-worker:*

Step 6: Setting Up Laravel Task Scheduler Cron

Laravel's unified scheduler executes commands like daily email digests or report calculations. Add one line to your crontab:

(crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo "* * * * * cd /var/www/my-laravel-app && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1") | crontab -