Deploying to a Real Server: Lessons from AS02

Moving from Laravel Herd on my laptop to an actual production VPS was a different kind of challenge entirely. Suddenly things like file permissions, environment variables, and web server configuration weren't abstracted away anymore. The biggest realisation was how many small pieces have to line up correctly: PHP-FPM sockets, Nginx routing, MySQL credentials, and Laravel's own configuration all need to agree with each other. One wrong path or missing quote in the .env file and the whole site falls over. Getting the site live on a real domain, even a free DuckDNS one, made the whole project feel tangible in a way local development never quite did.