When you’re doing software development, you’ll often need the local development dependencies on your local machine.
Your language compiler, a package manager, an IDE, etc.
But if you’re just trying something out, deploying a demo someone prepared earlier, you might not need all the things.
I’ve been recently working on a Laravel demo that doesn’t require PHP to deploy.
Since I’m using Google Cloud Buildpacks, I don’t even need a Dockerfile since Cloud Buildpacks detects PHP for me.
This came up during development of my demo, and I thought it was interesting enough to pull out into a blog post. (The following is paraphrased from that discussion thread.)
In Laravel, APP_KEY plays a similar role to SECRET_KEY in Django, where it’s a required value for certain operations the framework uses. It’s generated for you if you create a new laravel app via the installer, but I’m providing all the code.
The reason we need the user to have PHP and Composer installed is the php artisan key:generate command later to generate the APP_KEY.
But. I can remove the composer dependency by getting the user to generate their own APP_KEY to put into the .env file with pure PHP:
php -r "echo 'APP_KEY=base64:'.base64_encode(random_bytes(32));"
The user needs Node and NPM on their system to do the static asset compilation (because these aren’t installed in the production container). Given this dependency, the user could use node to generate the key instead:
node -e "require('crypto').randomBytes(32,function(o,e){console.log('APP_KEY=base64:'+e.toString('base64'))});"
Or, without node or php, if we can presume openssl on a user’s machine (or direct them to run in Cloud Shell):
echo "APP_KEY=base64:$(openssl rand -base64 32)"
At some point this demo will be live, then I can show y’all how to deploy Laravel without having to run it locally.
Of course you probably would want to have it run locally, but that’s not a dependency for deployment 😀