Automating deployments for your Laravel 8 project (or any other version) on your dedicated or shared hosting sounds daunting at first. I have been at that place. For my job board [https://arbeitnow.com/] back when I launched it, I started looking at tools that I could use for deployment for free. If you don’t have a budget, or you’re keen on learning how to deploy automatically or you like setting up things yourself, this is a decent option.
Setup
- Ubuntu 20.04
- PHP 8 & PHP FPM
- Laravel 8.x
- Deployer [https://deployer.org/] 7 by Anton Medvedev (wonderful open source [https://github.com/deployphp/deployer] tool) — we will use the latest beta with support for PHP 8
On your terminal in the Laravel project, install the package (watch out for the latest releases of Deployer [https://github.com/deployphp/deployer/releases])
composer require deployer/deployer — dev
Or if you prefer a distribution version
composer require deployer/dist — dev
Once that is done, let’s initiate which will create a deploy.php ideally at the root of the project which we’ll edit
dep init
Most of the
[ ‘.git’, ‘/storage/’, ‘/vendor/’, ‘/node_modules/’, ‘.github’, ‘deploy.php’, ], ]); task(‘php-fpm:restart’, function () { run(‘service php8.0-fpm restart’); }); // Hosts host(‘your_website_or_IP’) ->setRemoteUser(‘your_SSH_user’) // SSH user ->setDeployPath(‘/var/www/website’) // Deploy path ->setIdentityFile(‘~/.ssh/id_rsa’); // Your SSH key after(‘deploy:failed’, ‘deploy:unlock’); // In case your deployment goes wrong desc(‘Deploy the application’); task(‘deploy’, [ ‘deploy:info’, ‘deploy:prepare’, ‘deploy:lock’, ‘deploy:release’, ‘rsync’, ‘deploy:secrets’, ‘deploy:shared’, ‘deploy:vendors’, ‘deploy:writable’, ‘php-fpm:restart’, ‘artisan:storage:link’, ‘artisan:view:cache’, ‘artisan:config:cache’, ‘artisan:optimize’, ‘artisan:migrate’, ‘deploy:symlink’, ‘deploy:unlock’, ‘deploy:cleanup’, ]); Deployer 7 has the recipes for most of your common tasks built-in, which is great. You can see the list of available recipes [https://github.com/deployphp/deployer/tree/master/recipe]. Once this is all setup, all you have to do is run and that should be do everything you’ve described dep deploy You should see a new folder structure in your host, where it has releases and a release folder. Deployer syncs your code to your server using rsync, runs your tasks and then creates a symlink to point to the release folder which contains your latest code. So make sure that you point your webserver to /var/www/website/release, restart your webserver, and you should be good to go. If you’re looking for automating this using GitHub Actions, take a look at this great guide by Atymic [https://atymic.dev/blog/github-actions-laravel-ci-cd/] — it’s what helped me discover this tool and guided me on the entire process.
