AnswerixAI Docs AnswerixAI Docs AI Search Visibility, GEO & AEO platform

Installation

Run the full AnswerixAI stack on your own server.

On this page 5

Stack overview

AnswerixAI is a single Laravel 12 application (Inertia 2 + React 19 frontend). A production deployment runs four processes from one codebase:

Process Command Purpose
HTTP PHP-FPM behind Nginx (or php artisan serve for dev) Dashboard, API, marketing site
Queue worker php artisan queue:work Tracking runs, content briefs, site audits, readability generations
Scheduler php artisan schedule:work (or a cron entry) Daily tracking, housekeeping sweeps
Reverb (optional) php artisan reverb:start Realtime dashboard updates (falls back to polling when absent)

Plus one external dependency:

  • PostgreSQL 16 — the only supported database.

Prerequisites

  • Linux host (or macOS for development)
  • PHP 8.3+ with the usual Laravel extensions (pdo_pgsql, mbstring, intl, …)
  • Composer 2, Node.js 20+ and npm
  • PostgreSQL 16
  • API keys for at least one AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini)
  • A Cloro API key for web-engine scraping (ChatGPT web, Google AI Overview/Mode, Copilot, …)

Steps

  1. Clone the repo and install dependencies

    bash
    git clone <your-repo-url> answerix
cd answerix/laravel
composer install --no-dev
npm ci && npm run build

  2. Configure the environment

    bash
    cp .env.example .env
php artisan key:generate

    Set your PostgreSQL connection (DB_*), APP_URL, at least one AI provider key, and Cloro credentials. See Env variables for the full reference.

  3. Run database migrations

    bash
    php artisan migrate --force

    Migrations create every table, index, and the SQL aggregate functions the analytics pages rely on — no manual SQL required.

  4. Start the processes

    Use supervisor (or systemd) to keep the queue worker, scheduler, and Reverb running:

    ini
    [program:answerix-queue]
command=php /var/www/answerix/laravel/artisan queue:work --tries=3
autorestart=true

[program:answerix-schedule]
command=php /var/www/answerix/laravel/artisan schedule:work
autorestart=true

[program:answerix-reverb]
command=php /var/www/answerix/laravel/artisan reverb:start
autorestart=true

    Point Nginx + PHP-FPM at public/ for HTTP.

  5. Create your first user — open https://your-host/sign-up and register. Complete onboarding to create your organization and first brand.

Note

Site Audit dependency: the audit engine falls back to headless Chrome (Browsershot/Puppeteer) when a page can't be fetched directly. Run npm install on the server (Chromium is ~170 MB) and set BROWSERSHOT_NODE_BINARY if the queue worker's PATH doesn't include Node.

Production hardening

For a real deployment behind a domain:

  • Front the app with Cloudflare (proxied) or Caddy/Nginx for HTTPS
  • Restrict origin ports with firewall rules to known IPs
  • Set APP_ENV=production, APP_DEBUG=false, and run php artisan config:cache && php artisan route:cache
  • Ship storage/logs/ to a logging service or rotate with logrotate
  • Take regular PostgreSQL backups (pg_dump on a cron, or your provider's managed backups)

Local development

bash
composer run dev   # serves HTTP + queue + Vite together

Seed a populated demo dashboard with php artisan db:seed --class=DemoSeeder, then sign in with [email protected] / demo123.

Continue: Env variables →