Ways of deploying Laravel App

There are many-many variations of how you can deploy your app. Of course, it heavily depends on the type of app: whether it’s a simple one-page website or a high-load SAAS.

I try to follow two main concepts when it comes to deployment:
- it should be as automated as possible
- it must be cost-effective.

I can highlight a few main deployment solutions: Vapor, Forge and DigitalOcean App platform.

Vapor

I’ve already covered deployment serverless applications via Vapor. In general, it’s a really good solution for heavily loaded apps. Also, it can be cost-effective for apps with not-predictable traffic. Using Vapor you won’t be needed to buy super powerful instances. Your app will be scaled horizontally. For sure, Vapor is not very useful for a simple website with predictable traffic and will cost you a minimum of $39(subscription) and at least $50 of AWS cost(if you use the smallest RDS instance). So, in general, nearly $100 can be a bit pricy for a small website.

Forge

This SaaS solution can be a great alternative to Vapor for regular websites. It gives you a lot of automation and full control of your servers at the same time.
It helps you with provisioning everything you need with the Laravel app: database, cache, queue, etc. And it’s a bit cheaper than Vapor, it costs $19/month + DigitalOcean cost(it can be only $5–$10 for the smallest instances)