Programming does not getting easier. I used to put my code for a specific process in a single file, and perhaps in a single function declaration. When event driven programming arrived, the code was sliced by events. Now, application frameworks demand that a code is sliced into many files and functions. A web application uses multiple frameworks which make code slicing more pervasive.
I was inspecting ember.js for a browser-based application framework. Ember.js uses jquery which is a library that I use to simplify javascript programming. Ember.js itself is a MVC framework. Look at the ember.js 'Getting Started' if you want to see what I meant by code slicing. However, I was writing this post because of Laravel, yet another application framework for the server-side. Ember.js needs to talk to a server for centralized storage. To be specific, I needed a REST server for my ember.js application. Laravel seemed to be a good candidate. Laravel itself was another MVC framework. Suddenly I was using two MVC framework for a web application. Just imagine how much code slicing I had to do.
I preferred a server application to be running in a shared host. So I wanted to test run Laravel in a shared hosting server, particularly in GoDaddy. Laravel was new and I wrote this post so that I can remember the trick.
First, I had to install Laravel in localhost because the installation process uses Composer which I had to install earlier. I simply could not run Composer in the GoDaddy shared host. Laravel was also dependent to some libraries from Github, which Composer had to download using the git tool installed after the Composer in localhost. Once Laravel installed, I packed, uploaded to and unpacked it in my GoDaddy shared host.
It wasn't a smooth sailing. Laravel needed PHP 5.3. I had a problem when I first ran Laravel in GoDaddy. It threw a dubious error with __DIR__ in the message. Since Laravel was new, googling did not help. My curiosity found that __DIR__ did not exist in PHP 5.2. My GoDaddy shared host was set to use PHP 5.2. So, I upgraded it to 5.3.
Interestingly Laravel did not start from the installed root folder. It started from the public folder in the installed root folder. The Laravel team claimed they did it that way for security reason. But GoDaddy did not share the same idea. The security measure simply did not work with GoDaddy shared host. And running your site from yourdomain.com/public was a very bad idea. I had an option to use URL redirection.
However, I took a different approach. I used another domain that I pointed to my_project/public folder where the my_project folder contained Laravel. That way I can have multiple domains pointing to multiple instances of Laravel in a single GoDaddy shared host.
My journey with Laravel and ember.js had just started.
[Edit 1]
Yes, I was greeted by the "You have arrived." message. And I continued with the Laravel Quickstart on Route. Unfortunately, I got a message "No input file specified" when I hit mydomain.com/users. Googling around showed that I was not alone. There were many suggestions but none gave a direct solution. I tried them all to no avail. The approach to point mydomain.com to my_project/public folder requires that I also have to declare
RewriteBase /
in the .htaccess file in the public folder. My final .htaccess file looks like this:
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
where the highlighted line is the one I added.
[Edit 2]
Laravel is using a templating system called Blade. Ember.js is using Handlebars. So, now I have to deal with two templating system in an application, more code slicing.
I was inspecting ember.js for a browser-based application framework. Ember.js uses jquery which is a library that I use to simplify javascript programming. Ember.js itself is a MVC framework. Look at the ember.js 'Getting Started' if you want to see what I meant by code slicing. However, I was writing this post because of Laravel, yet another application framework for the server-side. Ember.js needs to talk to a server for centralized storage. To be specific, I needed a REST server for my ember.js application. Laravel seemed to be a good candidate. Laravel itself was another MVC framework. Suddenly I was using two MVC framework for a web application. Just imagine how much code slicing I had to do.
I preferred a server application to be running in a shared host. So I wanted to test run Laravel in a shared hosting server, particularly in GoDaddy. Laravel was new and I wrote this post so that I can remember the trick.
First, I had to install Laravel in localhost because the installation process uses Composer which I had to install earlier. I simply could not run Composer in the GoDaddy shared host. Laravel was also dependent to some libraries from Github, which Composer had to download using the git tool installed after the Composer in localhost. Once Laravel installed, I packed, uploaded to and unpacked it in my GoDaddy shared host.
It wasn't a smooth sailing. Laravel needed PHP 5.3. I had a problem when I first ran Laravel in GoDaddy. It threw a dubious error with __DIR__ in the message. Since Laravel was new, googling did not help. My curiosity found that __DIR__ did not exist in PHP 5.2. My GoDaddy shared host was set to use PHP 5.2. So, I upgraded it to 5.3.
Interestingly Laravel did not start from the installed root folder. It started from the public folder in the installed root folder. The Laravel team claimed they did it that way for security reason. But GoDaddy did not share the same idea. The security measure simply did not work with GoDaddy shared host. And running your site from yourdomain.com/public was a very bad idea. I had an option to use URL redirection.
However, I took a different approach. I used another domain that I pointed to my_project/public folder where the my_project folder contained Laravel. That way I can have multiple domains pointing to multiple instances of Laravel in a single GoDaddy shared host.
My journey with Laravel and ember.js had just started.
[Edit 1]
Yes, I was greeted by the "You have arrived." message. And I continued with the Laravel Quickstart on Route. Unfortunately, I got a message "No input file specified" when I hit mydomain.com/users. Googling around showed that I was not alone. There were many suggestions but none gave a direct solution. I tried them all to no avail. The approach to point mydomain.com to my_project/public folder requires that I also have to declare
RewriteBase /
in the .htaccess file in the public folder. My final .htaccess file looks like this:
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
where the highlighted line is the one I added.
[Edit 2]
Laravel is using a templating system called Blade. Ember.js is using Handlebars. So, now I have to deal with two templating system in an application, more code slicing.
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