laravel on fasthosts

Yet another tutorial about deploying Laravel to a shared server! To be precise, I'm deploying to a Fasthosts server. While this obviously isn't ideal, sometimes there's no escaping it, and there's no reason you can't deploy Laravel to Fasthosts. Here are the steps I went through (I'm using Laravel 5.2).

My FTP space looked like this at the start:

├── /
|   ├── htdocs
|   ├── logfiles
|   ├── webapp

Normally you would upload your web site to htdocs, but with Laravel things are slightly different. You don't want the application source code to be publicly accessible. So I created a new folder to contain this code, on the same level as htdocs, and called it app_base:

├── /
|   ├── app_base
|   ├── htdocs
|   ├── logfiles
|   ├── webapp

Before uploading it was necessary to make a small change to the public/index.php file. I changed the first two lines to:

require __DIR__.'/../app_base/bootstrap/autoload.php';
$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../app_base/bootstrap/app.php';

I uploaded the contents of my website's public folder to htdocs, and the rest of the app to app_base. I visit my website in the browser, and get a 500 error. Fasthosts stores their error logs in the logfiles folder, so I go there and open up error.log, and see "Option MultiViews not allowed here".

This relates to a section in public/.htaccess: Options -MultiViews. By removing that I have a fully working Laravel app on Fasthosts.