How to deploy a website code into a compute engine virtual machine and serve the website from GCP

In this tutorial I will clone the codebase of a pre-built website from GitHub into a virtual machine and serve the website files over the internet.

This tutorial builds on a previous tutorial: How to setup a compute engine VM on GCP and install LAMP stack on the server.

Prerequisite

Complete tutorial: How to setup a compute engine VM on GCP and install LAMP stack on the server.

Find the link to the YouTube tutorial here.

Steps

i) SSH into the VM – Log into your GCP console and SSH into the server virtual machine instance.

ii) Change to the apache2 web server root directory:

ls
cd /var/www/html

List files

ls

iii) Clone prebuilt code from https://github.com/ugogineering/computershop2 into the VM with the command:

sudo git clone https://github.com/ugogineering/computershop2.git

List files:

ls

Change to the cloned directory

cd computershop2

iv) Move cloned files to web server root directory

sudo mv * ..

v) Change directory

cd ..

vi) List files

ls

vi) Visit website file in the virtual machine from a browser over the internet by opening a browser and going to

http://[EXTERNAL_IP]/index.php

You should see the website home page. Make sure that you don’t use the https protocol specifier because HTTPS is not configured.

END.

What we accomplished in this tutorial

i) We cloned a website code from GitHub into a compute engine virtual machine on Google Cloud Platform (GCP);

ii) We viewed a web page from the virtual machine from a browser over the internet.

NB: With the skills you learned in this blog and accompanying video you have skills to clone code from a repository into a compute engine virtual machine.

If you have comments or corrections about this blog post please write them in the comments section below and I will respond. Thank you.

References

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