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',
]);

Deployer can also be configured to work with either GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD.

Learn more by reading the documentation and view the source code on GitHub.