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Deployment

Introduction

When you're ready to deploy your Laravel application to production, there are some important things you can do to make sure your application is running as efficiently as possible. In this document, we'll cover some great starting points for making sure your Laravel application is deployed properly.

Server Requirements

The Laravel framework has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum PHP version and extensions:

  • PHP >= 8.2
  • Ctype PHP Extension
  • cURL PHP Extension
  • DOM PHP Extension
  • Fileinfo PHP Extension
  • Filter PHP Extension
  • Hash PHP Extension
  • Mbstring PHP Extension
  • OpenSSL PHP Extension
  • PCRE PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension
  • Session PHP Extension
  • Tokenizer PHP Extension
  • XML PHP Extension

Server Configuration

Nginx

If you are deploying your application to a server that is running Nginx, you may use the following configuration file as a starting point for configuring your web server. Most likely, this file will need to be customized depending on your server's configuration. If you would like assistance in managing your server, consider using a first-party Laravel server management and deployment service such as Laravel Forge.

Please ensure, like the configuration below, your web server directs all requests to your application's public/index.php file. You should never attempt to move the index.php file to your project's root, as serving the application from the project root will expose many sensitive configuration files to the public Internet:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /srv/example.com/public;
 
    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
 
    index index.php;
 
    charset utf-8;
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }
 
    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
    location = /robots.txt  { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
 
    error_page 404 /index.php;
 
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
 
    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

Optimization

When deploying your application to production, there are a variety of files that should be cached, including your configuration, events, routes, and views. Laravel provides a single, convenient optimize Artisan command that will cache all of these files. This command should typically be invoked as part of your application's deployment process:

php artisan optimize

The optimize:clear method may be used to remove all of the cache files generated by the optimize command:

php artisan optimize:clear

In the following documentation, we will discuss each of the granular optimization commands that are executed by the optimize command.

Caching Configuration

When deploying your application to production, you should make sure that you run the config:cache Artisan command during your deployment process:

php artisan config:cache

This command will combine all of Laravel's configuration files into a single, cached file, which greatly reduces the number of trips the framework must make to the filesystem when loading your configuration values.

[!WARNING]
If you execute the config:cache command during your deployment process, you should be sure that you are only calling the env function from within your configuration files. Once the configuration has been cached, the .env file will not be loaded and all calls to the env function for .env variables will return null.

Caching Events

You should cache your application's auto-discovered event to listener mappings during your deployment process. This can be accomplished by invoking the event:cache Artisan command during deployment:

php artisan event:cache

Caching Routes

If you are building a large application with many routes, you should make sure that you are running the route:cache Artisan command during your deployment process:

php artisan route:cache

This command reduces all of your route registrations into a single method call within a cached file, improving the performance of route registration when registering hundreds of routes.

Caching Views

When deploying your application to production, you should make sure that you run the view:cache Artisan command during your deployment process:

php artisan view:cache

This command precompiles all your Blade views so they are not compiled on demand, improving the performance of each request that returns a view.

Debug Mode

The debug option in your config/app.php configuration file determines how much information about an error is actually displayed to the user. By default, this option is set to respect the value of the APP_DEBUG environment variable, which is stored in your application's .env file.

[!WARNING]
In your production environment, this value should always be false. If the APP_DEBUG variable is set to true in production, you risk exposing sensitive configuration values to your application's end users.

The Health Route

Laravel includes a built-in health check route that can be used to monitor the status of your application. In production, this route may be used to report the status of your application to an uptime monitor, load balancer, or orchestration system such as Kubernetes.

By default, the health check route is served at /up and will return a 200 HTTP response if the application has booted without exceptions. Otherwise, a 500 HTTP response will be returned. You may configure the URI for this route in your application's bootstrap/app file:

->withRouting(
    web: __DIR__.'/../routes/web.php',
    commands: __DIR__.'/../routes/console.php',
    health: '/up', 
    health: '/status', 
)

When HTTP requests are made to this route, Laravel will also dispatch a Illuminate\Foundation\Events\DiagnosingHealth event, allowing you to perform additional health checks relevant to your application. Within a listener for this event, you may check your application's database or cache status. If you detect a problem with your application, you may simply throw an exception from the listener.

Easy Deployment With Forge / Vapor

Laravel Forge

If you aren't quite ready to manage your own server configuration or aren't comfortable configuring all of the various services needed to run a robust Laravel application, Laravel Forge is a wonderful alternative.

Laravel Forge can create servers on various infrastructure providers such as DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, and more. In addition, Forge installs and manages all of the tools needed to build robust Laravel applications, such as Nginx, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Beanstalk, and more.

[!NOTE]
Want a full guide to deploying with Laravel Forge? Check out the Laravel Bootcamp and the Forge video series available on Laracasts.

Laravel Vapor

If you would like a totally serverless, auto-scaling deployment platform tuned for Laravel, check out Laravel Vapor. Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel, powered by AWS. Launch your Laravel infrastructure on Vapor and fall in love with the scalable simplicity of serverless. Laravel Vapor is fine-tuned by Laravel's creators to work seamlessly with the framework so you can keep writing your Laravel applications exactly like you're used to.