Deployer

Deployer is a free, open-source deployment tool written in PHP by Anton Medvedev. It helps you easily deploy your PHP application to a server. By automating common deployment tasks such as pulling code, running migrations, and clearing caches, Deployer reduces the risk of human error and ensures consistent, repeatable deployments across environments.

Features

Ability to configure your server, setup a firewall, install PHP and MySQL or Postgres, configure HTTPS, etc.
Zero downtime deployments with the ability to rollback to the previous release.
Ready to use recipes for most frameworks and applications (including a recipe for Laravel).

Installation

Install Deployer using Composer:

composer global require deployer/deployer

Once installed, navigate to your project directory and run:

dep init

After answering a few questions, this will create a deploy.php or deploy.yaml file for your deployment recipe. This file defines hosts, tasks, and dependencies on other recipes.

Tasks are set using the task function. You can also describe a task with the desc function.

It is recommended to use an identity key or private key when connecting to a server. You can add it to your ~/.ssh/config file.

Host *
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Next, run the following command to provision your server:

dep provision

The provision command will ask about PHP versions, database preferences, and other requirements and install everything required to run your application.

Lastly, you can deploy your project with:

dep deploy

After your first successful deployment, your deployment path will look like this:

~/www                          // deploy_path
 |- current -> releases/1      // Symlink to current release
 |- releases                   // Directory for all releases
    |- 1                       // Latest release
       |- ...
       |- .env -> shared/.env  // Symlink to shared .env file
 |- shared                     // Shared files between releases
    |- ...
    |- .env                    // Shared .env file
 |- .dep                       // Deployer configuration files

Additionally, you will need to modify your web server configuration to serve your application from the current directory. An example configuration for Nginx could be as follows:

root /home/deployer/www/current/public;
index index.php;
location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}

Example `deploy.php` file

namespace Deployer;
 
host('my-server')
    ->set('hostname', 'my-server.org')
       ->set('deploy_path', '~/www');
    ->set('remote_user', 'deployer');
 
desc('Define my first task');
task('task_a', function () {
    run('whoami');
});
 
desc('Run npm build process');
task('task_b', function () {
    cd('{{release_path}}');
    run('npm install');
    run('npm run prod');
});
 
// Group tasks
desc('Deploys your project');
task('deploy', [
    'task_a',
    'task_b',
]);