Laravel Forge – PHP Platforms On Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS, Rackspace

The need among PHP developers for a service that also does ongoing server management is why we built ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).

While Forge is an advanced deployment tool similar to PuPHPet (https://puphpet.com/), ServerPilot is a modern alternative to cPanel for developers using their own servers.

The other piece of this is Laravel Homestead (https://github.com/laravel/homestead), a Vagrant box to make local development easier. Through Forge, you can deploy basically the same environment Homestead provides to any of the services. It's an easier way of keeping your dev and prod environments the same.

I guess it's worth noting that Linode and Rackspace can provide server management for you if sysadmin work isn't your forte.

I think that Taylor mentioned in the keynote that BitBucket support is planned.

Edit: Confirmation of Bitbucket/Gitlab support coming soon: https://twitter.com/laravelphp/statuses/468401873519915008

Taylor has just mentioned on Twitter that he's going to start looking at Gitlab and Bitbucket tonight.

In the mean time you can use https://factor.io/ for "push-to-deploy" with BitBucket or Gitlab.

> so did Appfog (or PHPfog rather)

I never had to use GitHub for PHPFog. What do you mean exactly?

You can push your own code on Forge... you have full server access.

> something like Heroku that I can use with my own VPSs and I'll gladly pay you $10/month.

You could try something like Dokku, Docker powered mini-Heroku https://github.com/progrium/dokku If I am not wrong, DigitalOcean has dokku-installed images which you can just use within a few minutes.

Since it is just creating machines for you (i.e., it's created under your DigitalOcean account) can't you just stop paying for forge after you've created your servers, and keep using your DO account normally.

Problem with PuPHPet is that it's really buggy. I've used it more than 10 times (also recommended it to colleagues) and we managed to provision a box correctly maybe on two occasions.

Every time there was a different bug. Either something didn't install, or the config files weren't being loaded etc. I ended up learning Puppet because of it, so I guess some good has come of it ..

I know this is an answer most people don't want to hear, but why not build your own Ansible / provisioning workflow and use that to do everything these services do?

I have one built in Ansible for our Python webapp and the entire configuration is encoded in the playbooks, rolling up the application into a source distribution, pip installing it, and also installing the dependencies...

Very easy, dependable, and extremely flexible.

It's just another web framework, Coca-Cola is just another sugar water drink, Calvin and Hobbes is just another comic and a Lamborghini Aventador is just another car.

"Just another" is a really easy thing to say when it's someone else's creation. And more importantly trademarks are not indicators of quality or innovation. He's the owner and he chose to put it in the footer. This doesn't seem like a big deal.

It's not simply provisioning the server. It's also installing all the relevant packages, configuration, and deployment. The value is toward people who don't have the sysadmin/devops skills (or perhaps time) to manage that themselves.

https://laracasts.com is a website run by Jeffrey Way formerly head of web development at TutsPlus and a brilliant teacher. He has a number of lessons available for free at https://laracasts.com/tags/free including a series of lessons taking you through most of the basics (https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch/episodes/1).

It's only $9 a month which imo is great value. I'd take a look through the free lessons and if you like what you see sign up for a month or 2 and start building.

In addition to this Dayle Rees has an excellent book which can be found at https://leanpub.com/codebright which takes you through all the basic stuff and more. I personally prefer Laracasts as I am more video inclined and Jeffrey is an incredible teacher but they are both great resources.

I don't think I'd use a framework for that use case. I'd pull in the AWS PHP SDK (amazing that we can use three sets of acronyms like that) via Composer, and then create a "quick script", if such a thing exists, to handle orchestrating all of that.

Rendering HTML isn't the highlight of Laravel (altho the template language is pretty nice)

Do you have experience in Rails? Honestly, Laravel just feels like "PHP on Rails" to me. It's a full framework like Rails, so it takes some getting used to. The Code Bright [1] tutorial was great for learning the syntax, and the Laravel documentation [2] helps during development

I'm not sure what your idea is, exactly, but once you get Laravel up and running it's fairly easy to do what it sounds like you're saying. Create a Model to interact with the database, create a controller for your routing, and then a couple of views for your form/success page/etc.

[1] http://daylerees.com/codebright [2] http://laravel.com/docs

The "Laravelesque" way to do this would be:

- POST route to a controller which calls a model which handles the database stuff, then redirects to..

- the GET route which calls a controller which calls a model which pulls from the database and returns a View which parses the result of the query into a template.

Although you could do it all inside the route closures as well if you wanted... I don't know how much extra overhead there is doing it one way versus the other.

If you want to use Laravel I might suggest picking up one of the starters you can find on github or reading up on MVC, it's really not that hard although it can seem complicated because Laravel puts so much effort into trying to cover every possible model.

Although, given what you're describing, Slim Framework with Twig and a simple class for SQL might be easier.

Depends on what "basic PHP" really mean. Modern PHP can be overwhelming for people from PHP4 / 5.0 eras.

I would (arbitrarily) reduce your choices to those two :

- Your project is not public and/or not likely to evolve much beyond the initial requirements : get Bootstrap and use a "basic" PHP script. You can already do a lot with raw PHP with the SPL (autoloader etc), filters (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.filter.php), etc.

- If you need more, use a microframework like Silex or Flight. The learning curve will be steeper, but you'll also get more feature out of the box, if you need them.

This preview was published after the announcement: http://mattstauffer.co/blog/getting-your-first-site-up-and-r...

Forge is essentially a platform that makes it very easy to provision a Laravel-ready server (though it states it works with other frameworks too). It's a replication of Laravel Homestead (http://laravel.com/docs/homestead) on a server, so you can have the same development and production environments.

Use digitalocean api to create servers and ssh into them to do stuff.

I think that $10 is a reasonable bet to try out something that could save someone a lot of time and effort. Having a minimum helps weed out the casual tire-kickers. The people that pay the $10 to try it out _want_ to make this service work for them.

I sort of agree. This looks really interesting but there is a distinct lack of a demo or good walkthrough at least.

Deploying a rails app to a VPS (e.g. digital ocean or linode) isn't that much harder than setting up a development rails server on your work machine. If you have some time in the next few days for a screenshare I'll walk you through it - johnnybrown<%= prime_numbers[3] %>@gmail.com

heroku.com

Probably so honestly. It's not super Laravel specific. I have installed ExpressionEngine on a Forge box in testing but haven't tried Wordpress.

Maybe we could suggest renaming it to bikeshed, then using the framework with the new name would be "bikeshedding".

That's not even remotely close to being the first thing that I think of when I learned about laravel.

Laravel is a widely used PHP framework.

I've had the misfortune of being forced to use Laravel on a project, and the larval connotations are pretty apt. Basically it's yet another PHP framework that adds megabytes of bloat to your application in order to give you alternate ways of doing things that are already trivial to do in PHP without providing anything that's actually helpful. Its one redeeming 'feature' is that they didn't go too far out of their way to make it incompatible with Composer, so once you work your way through Laraval's inane routing DSL (which, being built upon PHP, is a shitty DSL, and doesn't add any value over an if-else chain anyway) you can reference whatever libraries you need to get the job done without a lot of contortions. Even then, it throws good practice out the window by defaulting to throwing all the application-specific classes in the global namespace (which makes Composer's work harder, since it has to scan the entire app/ directory to build the class -> file map) and failing to provide any way to pass context to your code other than through global state.

Don't even get me started on the ubiquitous, ridiculously verbose, unhelpful, and intelligence-insulting comments. It's this kind of thing that makes me want to take up shooting sprees.