Recently I deployed my Laravel app to a droplet on DigitalOcean using the LAMP image. I was scratching my head for a bit because after deployment, I couldn’t get the site to work. I’d just continue to see the default site.

I then realised that I had to disable the default site, as it was conflicting with the new site I’d enabled. So I ran

sudo a2dissite 000-default

And the issue was resolved.

I also found that Laravel would throw errors about not being able to write to logs when attempting to access static resources (e.g. storage/images/test.png or /login) so I needed to:

• Generate an application key to get the login page to load via php artisan key:generate
• Assign the new user I had created for the site to the www-data group
• Run php artisan storage:link
• chmod the storage folder to 755

Once I had those set up, the site worked as normal. Next step, setting up mod_pagespeed..