Composer on cPanel

A simple PHP app showing how to set up cPanel auto-deployment with Git and Composer. It uses the Carbon library to display formatted server time and shows PHP version on a basic HTML page served from public_html.

Prerequisites

To get going, you’ll need:

• A cPanel account with Git Version Control enabled
• A remote Git repository (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.)
• PHP 7.4 or higher on your hosting environment
• Composer available on the server (cPanel’s .cpanel.yml runs it automatically)
• SSH access to your server (optional)

Deployment Structure

When you add your repo in cPanel’s Git Version Control, cPanel clones it into:

/home/username/repositories/composer-on-cpanel/

But your actual web root is:

/home/username/public_html/

We’ll use .cpanel.yml to:

1. Run Composer
2. Copy the fresh build into public_html

Project Structure

/home/username/
├── repositories/
│   └── composer-on-cpanel/         # your Git repo root
│       ├── composer.json           # project dependencies (Carbon)
│       ├── .cpanel.yml             # cPanel deployment tasks
│       └── index.php               # demo script
└── public_html/                    # live site served by Apache
    ├── index.php                   # demo script
    └── vendor/                     # Composer dependencies

Setup & Deployment

1. Configure cPanel

   • In cPanel, open Git Version Control.
   • Click Clone Repository, paste your repo URL.
   • Set Clone Path to /home/username/repositories/composer-on-cpanel.
   • Enable Auto Deploy on the main branch.

2. Every push triggers:

   • Git pull in /repositories/composer-on-cpanel
   • Composer install (installs Carbon)
   • New files copied into public_html

Visit your domain to see the formatted Carbon date/time and PHP version.

Tips

• Customize .cpanel.yml cp commands if you need to preserve files across deploys.
• Use rsync instead of cp for better performance and exclude unnecessary files.
• The point of this demo is to show how to set up cPanel auto-deployment with Git and Composer if you don't have SSH access to your server. But optional SSH access is recommended for production use.