Laravel 5 subdomain sites hosts as new project or not? - laravel

Question

I have this issue where I cant decide what's for what and what is the best. Hope someone could provide me with some explanations to clear up my confusion.
So here it is, I have a site which is quite large. Currently running on Yii Framework which I am in the process of migrating it to L5 Framework. This website has several sub sites structure like below example:
1) www.example.com
2) www.example.com/{username}
3) explore.example.com
4) explore.example.com/{organization}
5) connect.example.com
6) coin.example.com
7) m.example.com
8) e3.example.com
So the current hosting method is using 1 project to host everything. Here comes the problem, should one of the sub sites were to be disabled for whatever reason, the whole website would need to be put to a stop, code to disable the site and the deploy the entire site again.
Back to L5 Framework, I noticed that I can do the same in laravel aslo to host everything in one project using the following routing methods in routes.php:
Route::group(['domain' => '{account}.myapp.com'], function()
{
Route::get('user/{id}', function($account, $id)
{
//
});
});
Again the same question rises, if there is a sub site to be disabled, I would need to code the disable site and redeploy the whole site again. So I was thinking if it is practical to host each sub sites in a new project as a module such that if any changes to that sub site, it will only affect that particular module while the others maintain running.
Additionally I would also like to ask, if I host it as a separate project, my website requires the user to login before they can navigate to any of the pages or application. So how do I tell the other modules where the user has been logged in and everything can be proceed as usual?
Finally of course if anyone have any other suggestions or approaches feel free to enlighten me too. My main motives are to achieve:
1) Maximum development flexibility
2) Fail tolerance
3) Sub sites can share the same login with the main website
(You are only require to login at the main page and you will be authorized
to use the rest of the web application)
Thank you.

Answer 1

I guess, the answer will be too late. Nevertheless, it might help someone else.
Today I faced a similar dilemma myself - should I use subsites or separate applications for public site and admin site of my application.
At first it seemed that I should have separate apps to avoid bringing down bith sites if I wish to upgrade just one of them. But I did not want to duplicate all the Laravel boilerplate code all over again in my repository.
Then it came to me that actually I can implement everything as subsites, but I can deploy the Laravel app to multiple subdomains. Thus there will be single app in the repository, but I'll have a different copy for each subdomain.
Drawback - the code of controllers, views (and some site specific models) will be duplicated for each deployed site. That's not an issue for a small site - just a bunch of unused files. But if I wanted a clean solution, I could implement some modular structure and bring in site-specific MVC stuff during deployment. That's another topic, I guess. There are some 3rd party solutions for modular Laravel apps. Of course, modular solution adds to the complexity and maintenance, therefore I have nothing against file duplication on server, if that's not an issue for you.
Regarding authentication - I haven't tried it with Laravel, but I have experience with implementing cookies for top level domain in pure PHP application. Essentially, you can configure your session cookie to be effective for all subdomains, and then users will have to log-in just once in any of your sites. Here seems to be a working solution for Laravel:
Persisting sessions across subdomains in Laravel 5
Just set the top level domain to .example.com and theoretically you should be good to go. For development purposes, I'd store this value in .env, though.