How to install Laravel 4 to a web host subfolder without publicly exposing /app/ folder?

Question

I was wondering if any of you know of a way to install Laravel 4 in a web host SUBDIRECTORY / subfolder while not exposing the /app/ folder and other sensible files to the publicly accesible part of the host.

The idea is, I'd be able to access http://mydomain.com/mylaravel/ to be able to use Laravel, but at the same time I want to avoid anyone doing something like going to http://mydomain.com/app/ or http://mydomain.com/mylaravel/app/ and basically being able to see my config files and other code.

Answer 1

So I figured out how to do this. I'll explain with an example.

Suppose you a domain, http://domain.com. Here's an example of the structure you might be using:

domain.com/    (the root of your web hosting)
|-- yourlaravel4_base/
|-- [some other folders...]
|-- public_html/    (where your html files and such go)
|   |-- [some other folders...]
|   |-- yourlaravel4/

/public_html/ is the root of the publicly accessible part of your web hosting files. You want to create a subfolder in /public_html/ (in this case /public_html/yourlaravel4/). In this subfolder you will store all the contents of the Laravel 4 public/ folder.

Now, for the rest of the files. You have to go to the root of your web hosting files, that is, you wanna be at domain.com/ level, therefore being able to see public_html/ and some other folders. Then, we need to create a folder here, where Laravel 4's base files will be stored. In this case, it's domain.com/yourlaravel4_base/. Inside yourlaravel4_base/ we need to store every file and folder that exists in the base Laravel 4 directory. That would be app/, bootstrap/, vendor/, server.php, etc. Everything EXCEPT the /public/ folder, whose contents you already stored in public_html/yourlaravel4/.

Finally, we need to edit 2 files: Laravel's /bootstrap/paths.php and /public/index.php.

---

In the paths.php file, replace:

'app' => __DIR__.'/../app',

with:

'app' => __DIR__.'/../../yourlaravel4_base/app',

---

In the paths.php file, replace:

'public' => __DIR__.'/../public',

with:

'public' => __DIR__,

---

In the paths.php file, replace:

'base' => __DIR__.'/..',

with:

'base' => __DIR__.'/../../yourlaravel4_base',

---

In paths.php, replace:

'storage' => __DIR__.'/../app/storage',

with:

'storage' => __DIR__.'/../../yourlaravel4_base/app/storage',

---

In index.php, replace:

require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/autoload.php';

with:

require __DIR__.'/../../yourlaravel4_base/bootstrap/autoload.php';

---

In index.php, replace:

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/start.php';

with:

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../../yourlaravel4_base/bootstrap/start.php';

Upload changes. Now you should be able to have Laravel 4 installed in a subfolder in your website without actually exposing the app/ folder and other sensitive files. :)