Envoyer, a deployment service, officially launched today. Envoyer is focused on the deployment side of applications and includes things like zero downtime deploys, health checks, cron job monitoring, and more. I had the pleasure of asking Taylor about the product and to find out a little more about the service:
Can you tell us about Envoyer?
Envoyer deploys your PHP applications with zero downtime. Typically when deploying a PHP application like Laravel, you would use “php artisan down” to put up a maintenance page until you are done deploying your application. Even then, while installing Composer updates, users of your application can hit a fatal error if they access your site at the wrong moment. With Envoyer, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can deploy all day long and not interrupt any of your customers.
What was your inspiration for creating Envoyer?
Just like with Forge, I’m scratching my own itch. I need a way to deploy Forge with zero downtime. At any moment, a provisioning callback request could be sent to Forge, and if Forge is down, that request could be lost. I need a way to deploy updates to Forge at any time without interrupting a single request. Of course, I’ve had this need with other applications too, such as a help desk application which is constantly receiving incoming e-mail.
How will it compare with Laravel Forge?
Envoyer is strictly focused on providing the best deployment experience available for PHP applications. Forge manages more aspects of server provisioning and creation, such as adding Nginx sub-domains, SSL certificates, queue workers, and Cron jobs. Envoyer is strictly focused on PHP deployment across one or many servers with zero downtime.
Forge and Envoyer are match made in heaven. Forge builds PHP servers with latest goodies. Envoyer ships your code to them with no downtime.
You’ve mentioned in the past that you like to build real-world projects with each Laravel release. Is that how this got started?
Yes, I started building Envoyer with early versions of Laravel 5. It served as a great “proving ground” for many Laravel 5 features, including form requests, queued job classes, event classes, and more.
If you’d like to find out more about Envoyer, Laracasts has a series of free videos, and Matt Stauffer has an in-depth tutorial on setting up your first project.
Check it out to take your deployments to the next level.
