How to use this guide

This guide will walk you through setting up a Laravel development environment on Elastic Beanstalk.

Before using Elastic Beanstalk, I was using a shared hosting account, and I got fed up with outdated packages and the lack of admin privileges. My goal with this guide was to create a dev server that closely mirrored my intended production environment in Elastic Beanstalk (another post on that coming soon). This is the exact setup I use for SimpliFit’s API dev server.

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

First, a quick overview. Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform as a Service (PaaS), allowing developers to deploy applications without the hassle of detailed server infrastructure, such as server provisioning or scaling to meet demand.

Elastic Beanstalk uses the following AWS products:

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Simple Notification Service (SNS)
• CloudWatch

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There are a ton of articles about how to set up Laravel and the author’s tools of choice, and I debated whether or not the Laravel community needs another. But seeing as I’ll be writing a lot of articles about Laravel and there may be people who, like me, have never used an MVC framework or Git before, I figured I’ll just write up a quick post. First up…

Setting up Git

If you were like me when you started coding, whenever you created a new version of a file, you’d save the old file with a date or previous version number tacked onto the file name. This quickly got out of hand and managing different versions of files became a huge headache for our alpha. This is where Git can help.

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