Learn how to boost Laravel performance with Nginx Load Balancer. Our Laravel Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Boost Laravel Performance with Nginx Load Balancer

Using a load balancer with Laravel and Nginx offers several benefits like boosting performance, availability, and scalability.

Why Use a Load Balancer with Laravel and Nginx?

Here’s why we should consider setting up a load balancer for our Laravel application:

• Improved Performance

  By distributing incoming traffic among multiple servers, load balancers prevent any single server from becoming overwhelmed. This distribution helps maintain optimal performance, ensuring our application remains responsive even under heavy load.
• High Availability

  Load balancers provide redundancy. If one server fails, traffic is automatically rerouted to other available servers, minimizing downtime.
• Scalability

  Load balancers make it easy to scale your application. We can easily add or remove servers as our application’s load increases or decreases, ensuring the infrastructure adapts to our needs.

How to Set Up a Load Balancer with Laravel and Nginx

Here are the prerequisites for setting up a load balancer with Laravel and Nginx:

• Multiple Laravel application servers running Nginx.
• A separate server that acts as the load balancer.
• SSH access to all servers.
• Laravel application deployed on all application servers.</li

Here are the steps to setting up a load balancer with Laravel and Nginx

How to Set Up Nginx on Application Servers

First, we have to make sure that Nginx is properly configured to serve our Laravel application on each server. A typical Nginx configuration for a Laravel application might look like this:

server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
root /var/www/laravel/public;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}


We have to replace `example.com` with our domain and adjust paths as necessary.

Install Nginx on the Load Balancer Server

1. First, install Nginx:

   sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx
2. Then, create a new Nginx configuration file for the load balancer, for example, `/etc/nginx/sites-available/load_balancer`.

   upstream laravel_app {
server app_server1_ip:80;
server app_server2_ip:80;
# Add more servers as needed
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://laravel_app;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
}


   Remember to replace `app_server1_ip` and `app_server2_ip` with the actual IP addresses of the Laravel application servers. Save the file and create a symbolic link to enable this configuration:

   sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/load_balancer /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
3. Next, test the Nginx configuration:

   sudo nginx -t
4. After that, restart Nginx:

   sudo systemctl restart nginx

Configure Health Checks

Nginx can perform health checks to ensure traffic is only routed to healthy application servers.

1. First, head to `routes/web.php`:

   Route::get('/health', function () {
return response()->json(['status' => 'ok'], 200);
});

2. Then, update the Nginx configuration for Health Checks:

   upstream laravel_app {
server app_server1_ip:80;
server app_server2_ip:80;
# Add more servers as needed
# Health checks
server app_server1_ip:80 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=30s;
server app_server2_ip:80 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=30s;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://laravel_app;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
location /health {
proxy_pass http://laravel_app/health;
}
}


Configure Sticky Sessions

If the Laravel application uses sessions and we want to maintain session persistence, we can configure sticky sessions.

1. Update Nginx Configuration for Sticky Sessions:

   upstream laravel_app {
ip_hash;
server app_server1_ip:80;
server app_server2_ip:80;
# Add more servers as needed
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://laravel_app;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
}


   The `ip_hash` directive ensures that the same client IP is always directed to the same server, maintaining session persistence.

Final Steps

1. Access the application through the load balancer’s IP or domain to ensure traffic is being distributed across the servers.
2. Furthermore, monitor the servers to, make sure they are handling the load efficiently. Use tools like Nginx logs, application logs, and monitoring services.
3. As the application grows, we can easily add more servers to the `upstream` block in the load balancer configuration.

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Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to boost Laravel performance with Nginx Load Balancer.