Preparing for Production

Your site works locally. Now let's get it ready for the real world. Before deploying, it helps to understand which parts of your project actually matter and what settings to change for production.

# Know Your Project

An October CMS project contains many directories, but your site really lives in just three:

• app/: your application code, custom classes, and app-level blueprints
• plugins/: installed plugins and any custom plugins you build
• themes/: your theme files (layouts, pages, partials, blueprints, assets)

Everything you have built in this tutorial (the theme, the blueprints, the pages) lives in themes/. If you installed any plugins, they are in plugins/. These three directories are what make your site yours.

The other directories (modules/, vendor/) are framework code provided by Composer. They are excluded from version control by default because they can be rebuilt with composer install at any time.

# Configure the Environment

Most production settings live in your .env file in the project root. Here are the important ones to change:

# Disable Debug Mode

Debug mode shows detailed error messages during development. In production, those messages expose sensitive information.

APP_DEBUG=false

With debug mode off, visitors see a clean error page while detailed errors go to your log files.

# Set Your Application URL

APP_URL=https://www.yoursite.com

Make sure this matches your actual domain with https://.

# Verify Your Application Key

The APP_KEY is used for encryption. It is generated during installation, but confirm it exists:

APP_KEY=base64:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If it is missing, generate one:

php artisan key:generate

# Configure Your Database

Update with your production database credentials:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=your_production_database
DB_USERNAME=your_database_user
DB_PASSWORD=your_database_password

# Configure Nginx

If your server uses Nginx, October CMS includes a ready-made configuration file at nginx.conf in the project root. Copy or reference this file in your Nginx server block to ensure URL rewriting and other settings work correctly.

# File Permissions

Your web server needs write access to these directories:

• storage/ (and all subdirectories)
• bootstrap/cache/

On most Linux servers:

chmod -R 755 storage bootstrap/cache
chown -R www-data:www-data storage bootstrap/cache

The exact user (www-data) depends on your server setup.

# Optimize for Performance

Once your settings are configured, cache them for faster performance:

php artisan october:optimize

# Pre-Deployment Checklist

# Next Steps

With your configuration in place, head to Deploying Your Site for instructions on getting your project onto a live server.

For the full reference on configuration options, see Configuration and Deployment in the developer documentation.