over-api VS docker-apache-php-laravel

The main concept you need to know about is the apache document root. This defines the start/root of "web space". Your document root is going to be the /public directory of your project. You should not be versioning or copying files in /vendor. That directory should be created by running composer install on the server from a shell in your project directory. composer will create the vendor directory, and pull all the same files you've been working with. This assumes that you have been versioning the composer.lock file. In production you only ever run composer install. Since laravel implements the front controller pattern, you need some sort of configuration to handle rewriting requests so they utilize the front controller (/public/index.php). Here is a typical mod_rewrite configuration you can put in a .htaccess file in the /public directory. For quite a while, many sysadmins paired nginx/php-fpm, whereas with apache you have the option to use mod_php. However, it is now quite possible to use apache and php-fpm. Think of php-fpm as the application server for php. Although this article talks about setting this up for the symfony framework, the principle would be exactly the same for a laravel app. I would recommend using apache with php-fpm as this is a more efficient use of resources and memory than setting apache up with mod_php. The main thing to ignore in that article is the use of the symfony package, which just provides a .htaccess that works with symfony. As symfony and Laravel are both front controller frameworks it might actually work with laravel, but I can't say for sure.