Deploying Laravel API on AWS using AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda

In this story I will show you haw you can host your laravel API in AWS using API Gateway and Lambda function.

As you know API Gateway and Lambda services are billed by number of calls and execution time and therefore they are considered to be the cheapest services of Aws. Also the two services are scalables, that mean that they can handle huge number of requests in a transparent way for the developer. You concentrate only in your API development.

Of course, we can not use AWS console to deploy our Laravel API since we must use many aws component to achieve this task (API Gateway, Lambda,S3, IAM roles etc …). The best AWS tool that allow us to automate deployment tasks is AWS CloudFormation by the way of stacks.

Let’s first create a new Laravel Application like below:

composer create-project laravel/laravel my-api

Then install Laravel serveless package using npm and Bref using composer. We will use theses tools to upload our API to CloudFront.

npm install -g serverless
composer require bref/bref
./vendor/bin/bref init
0
rm index.php

The 0 above is to automatically select the option Web application. Bref will then create serverless.yml and index.php. Since we’re using Laravel, we can remove the index.php and just keep the serverless.yml.

Before we move on to Serverless, let’s add a sample routing for our API by editing the routes/api.php file.

Route::get('/hello', fn () => response(['data' => 'Hello from Laravel!']));

Now we should add AWS credentials to .env file. You must first create new aws IMA user with AdministratorAccess.

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxxxxxxxx
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Open now serverless.yml template to apport some modifications. We change the handler from index.php to public/index.php as that’s the entry point for a Laravel application. There are also 3 important environment variables: LOG_CHANNEL, SESSION_DRIVER, and CACHE_DRIVER. The stderr driver will automatically drive log messages into CloudWatch and the array driver will essentially disable Session and Cache.

service: app

provider:
    name: aws
    region: eu-west-3
    runtime: provided.al2
    stackName: my-api
plugins:
    - ./vendor/bref/bref

functions:
    api:
        handler: public/index.php
        environment:
            LOG_CHANNEL: stderr
            SESSION_DRIVER: array
            CACHE_DRIVER: array
        description: ''
        timeout: 28 # in seconds (API Gateway has a timeout of 29 seconds)
        layers:
            - ${bref:layer.php-82-fpm}
        events:
            -   httpApi: '*'

# Exclude files from deployment
package:
    patterns:
        - '!node_modules/**'
        - '!tests/**'

Finally to deploy our Laravel API to AWS, simply execute the command below:

sls deploy

Deploying app to stage dev (eu-west-3)

✔ Service deployed to stack my-api (155s)

endpoint: ANY - https://00000000.execute-api.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com
functions:
  api: app-dev-api (25 MB)

Need a better logging experience than CloudWatch? Try our Dev Mode in console: run "serverless --console"

You can use your endpoint to test the API. It should look like this:

https://your_api_gateway_id.execute-api.eu-west-3.amazonaws.com/api/hello

That is all, Your Laravel API is now available behind AWS API Gateway and Lambda.