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thc1967's avatar

Envoyer Without Forge

So I have an ISP that has plenty of goodies on the box for me and I'm quite adept at managing that server back-end. I've managed servers and sites running a variety of PHP applications for years. Therefore, I don't think I need the capabilities of Forge.

However, I'm intrigued by the capabilities of Envoyer. It seems like once I have a server configured, Envoyer should streamline the (Laravel) application deployment process. I've watched the Envoyer videos here at least twice each and, if I were using Forge, I'd feel pretty comfortable...

...but I'm not using Forge. I can't imagine a reason I'd drop $20 a month on that. $10 a month for Envoyer? In a heartbeat, probably, after doing some more due diligence.

I've searched the Internet in a variety of ways to find any documentation at all about "Envoyer Without Forge" but nothing comes up.

So I'll ask the community: Have you tried Envoyer on a server that's not a Forge server? If so, how did it work out for you? Any issues I should be aware of? How different is the process from the Envoyer videos here?

Thanks!

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5 replies
bashy's avatar
bashy
Best Answer
Level 65

I've used Envoyer without Forge. It works fine if you already have a setup with php-fpm (Ubuntu/Debian tested).

If you want a free alternative to try it out (or to keep afterwards), try this: https://phpdeployment.org I use it myself now after becoming frustrated at Envoyer not being updated. Seems Forge gets all the attention.

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thc1967's avatar

Thanks for the response. I tried Envoyer, but it doesn't work on a shared host because it requires sudo. (You replied on that query, too, thanks.)

Ah well. Neat concept. Unfortunate implementation.

For the moment, I've deployed the site manually.

bashy's avatar

@thc1967 Yeah shared hosting is not a place for CD concepts. Best (and maybe cheaper) to get a VPS/Cloud server.

thc1967's avatar

It's actually more expensive to run on a VPS / Cloud Server, but only because I don't need that much power for the sites I'm serving and because I'd probably need something like Forge to provision the servers if I did that.

Forge + Envoyer + the cheapest Cloud box I can find is $35/month. Even without Envoyer, which is the one thing I really like, it's $25/month. I'm under $10/month on a shared host.

I can't sudo, so I can't use Envoyer, but the host I'm with is awesome about keeping modern software on the boxes and I'm super happy with the email service.

bashy's avatar

If you can set it up yourself (php, mysql, nginx), then it is most of the time - cheaper.

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