Recently, a client of mine running eCommerce on WordPress was faced with a bit of a dilemma. Due to a plugin conflict, their error log file grows at a staggering rate, eventually consuming all available disk space and crashing their site. I know as a developer, my first step when they reached out to me was to check the error logs. The first time I checked, the log file was over 80GB! Let’s talk a bit more about the setup here. They host with Codero on a VPS and manage everything through PLESK (gross). They run WordPress with WooCommerce. We had to take a phased approach here to solve the problem. I’ll be talking about phase one: Create a job to remove the error_log every 3 days. That’s the scope right there. Pretty simple! It doesn’t fix the overall issue: Why is the error log filling up so, much so fast? That’s my next phase (another day). Okay, let’s explain

Laravel has great documentation which is only one reason I love working with it so much. With that said, it has some dependencies that require a bit of research and configuration to get it installed. With a little bit of trial and error (and Google) I was able to get it set up. The issues that I had were mostly because of the host, not Laravel itself. Others may not have the same issue that I had, but I’ll walk through what I needed to to to get it up and running. INSTALLATION Laravel utilizes composer to install/run. Composer documentation explains two ways to install. curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php or php -r “readfile(‘https://getcomposer.org/installer’);” | php I had issues with both because every time I tried to run the command, I’d get an error saying I was running php 5.2.17. Running php -v showed exactly that. Now, I know when I set up the hosting for the domain I selected PHP 5.6