Installing Composer and Laravel 4 on Media Temple (gs)

I've seen this question floating around a bit in various places, people confused about how to get a Laravel 4 project up and running on Media Temple's (gs) grid server hosting. It's quite simple and doesn't involve too much trickery, so here is how you can go about getting it all going.

You're going to need to SSH into your (gs) first and then move into your domains directory. Next, run the git clone command to pull in a fresh copy of Laravel and move into the application directory. Be sure to replace example.com with the domain name you want to use.

git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel example.com && cd example.com

Next, you're going to need to install Composer into the directory. By default, (gs) PHP has allow_url_fopen disabled, which is required to install Composer. You can use the following command to toggle this setting.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -d allow_url_fopen=On

Once Composer is installed, you'll want to install Laravel's dependancies. Again, we toggle PHP to allow it to access outside URLs.

php -d allow_url_fopen=On composer.phar install

For safety, you're going to want to generate an encryption key for your app. (If you were to install Laravel through Composer's create-project command instead of manually via Git, this would be done for you already).

php artisan key:generate

Finally, you're going to need to rename the public folder. (gs) uses the html folder as the root for your application, so we have to rename the folder and then let Laravel know that's what we did.

mv public html

Now, edit the bootstrap/paths.php file and adjust the public path to be __DIR__.'/../html instead. Your Laravel 4 app should now be good to go on (gs)!