This guide will also cover Laravel pretty URLs with UBUNTU 18.04. This guide is heavily inspired from this guide

Install Apache using Ubuntu's package manager, apt:

sudo apt update sudo apt install apache2 

sudo ufw app list

Output

Available applications: Apache Apache Full Apache Secure OpenSSH 

If you look at the Apache Full profile, it should show that it enables traffic to ports 80 and 443: sudo ufw app info "Apache Full"

Output Profile: Apache Full Title: Web Server (HTTP,HTTPS) Description: Apache v2 is the next generation of the omnipresent Apache web server. Ports: 80,443/tcp 

Allow incoming HTTP and HTTPS traffic for this profile:

sudo ufw allow in "Apache Full" 

Now

http://your_server_ip 

will serve you Apache default page.

sudo apt install mysql-server 

Setup password for root user.

sudo mysql mysql> ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'secure_password'; mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; mysql> exit; 

For secure MySQL installation, please check this guide

In original guide, required Modules for Laravel are missing. Guide contains something like this.

sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

instead, we're going to install PHP 7.2 with all the Modules that Laravel requires.

sudo apt install php7.2 libapache2-mod-php7.2 php7.2-mbstring php7.2-xmlrpc php7.2-soap php7.2-gd php7.2-xml php7.2-cli php7.2-zip php-mysql php-curl 

In most cases, you will want to modify the way that Apache serves files when a directory is requested. Currently, if a user requests a directory from the server, Apache will first look for a file called index.html. We want to tell the web server to prefer PHP files over others, so make Apache look for an index.php file first.

To do this, type this command to open the dir.conf file in a text editor with root privileges:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf 

<IfModule mod_dir.c> DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm </IfModule>

move index.php after DirectoryIndex

<IfModule mod_dir.c> DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm </IfModule>

Restart the Apache web server.

sudo systemctl restart apache2 

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer 

cd /var/www/html

sudo composer create-project laravel/laravel MyProject --prefer-dist 

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/MyProject/ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/MyProject/ 

You can choose whatever name you want for this file, I am going to stick with laravel.conf

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.conf 

Add following content to file.

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@example.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/MyProject/public ServerName example.com <Directory /var/www/html/MyProject/public> Options +FollowSymlinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost>

Save the file and exit(hit esc then type :wq and hit Enter).

sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf sudo a2ensite laravel.conf sudo a2enmod rewrite sudo service apache2 restart 

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service 

and you're all set to go.

Head to http://example.com and you'll see Laravel homepage.