envoyer.io is live

There's also a new series to help get you started:

https://laracasts.com/series/envoyer

I just watched the first video. I am seriously blown away, like seriously.

TAYLOR, TAKE MY MONEY! ALL OF IT! (subscribe subscribe subscribe).

Seriously though, it looks amazing. Deployment has always been a tedious manual process for me. I've written shell scripts in the past to help manage it, but I often get lazy and end up just logging into the server and doing a git pull. This is going to save me so much time and hassle, especially when spinning up a new server and setting up deployments on it.

Also, I'm not on twitter, so I thought I would respond to this tweet here:

@laravelphp @laracasts apart from the outrageous pricing, it looks like a pretty neat service.

I don't get this. It's $10 per month, hardly outrageous. I'll end up saving enough money in a single month of using envoyer to pay for a years subscription. Maybe this person doesn't deploy very often, or maybe they don't do paid work.

Ehh, have to ignore those types of people. He has never used the service, but is already calling $10 outrageous.

As someone who deploys multiple times a week, I will gladly be signing up.

$10 is doable service like this! Everything in the Laravel world is low priced though! Think about Laracasts $9. Laravel Forge also $10!

For what it is, it's expensive. I'm not sure if you know what it does in the background but it's doable with a few SSH commands and maybe a nice bash script. Maybe that person knows how to do it or they find that amount of money a lot.

For ease of use/start it's great though.

I would like to see a joint-membership for Forge and Envoyer, I signed up to Forge and have used it for a few months with a Digital Ocean server, but it looks as though once the server has been set up, I don't need to use Forge any more.

Is that correct?

If so, maybe I thought Forge was Envoyer. (Before Envoyer was even a thing).

@bashy it starts at $100/year. For most developers, Envoyer only has to save you 1 or 2 hours for it to pay for itself. I'm not sure I could write robust deployment scripts that support roll-back, multiple servers, notifications, health checks etc in less than 2 hours. At the same time, I do understand there are developers in parts of the world where $100 would be a significant spend.

I think services like Laracasts, Forge and Envoyer serve a double purpose for the Laravel community.

They all obviously do what they were designed to do while at the same time I would like to think they also allow Taylor, Jeffrey (and others) to concentrate their efforts full-time working on Laravel. Even if you never watch a Laracasts video or utilise Forge/Envoyer, you are benefiting indirectly from the additional revenue flowing into the Laravel ecosystem and in-turn, the additional time dedicated to the development of Laravel that such revenue allows.

@Graham As I said, it's good for people who don't want to deal with it or don't know how to set this up, maybe they just want to support Laravel like you said.

Most will find problems with this setup, dealing with database, static files, uploads as well as session/cache data.

It's awsome...

http://procrasti-nation.eu/wp-content/uploads/Shut-up-and-take-my-money.jpg

Envoyer looks nice. For those who don't like yet another small web service there is always Mina (http://nadarei.co/mina/) which does the "zero downtime" thing as well with a /current and /releases + symlinks.

Now when will Taylor/Jeffery release "The complete Laravel package" with Laracasts, Envoyer, Forge and a ticket to Laracon? :)

@bashy doesn't session/cache data persist through deployments via the storage folder? Wouldn't static files/uploads be the same if they were in the storage folder?

I really like the service, though I'd prefer if there was a cheaper, one-project plan.

Not everyone might benefit the service so I find paying 10$/month for a minimum of 10 projects plan really expensive.

@TaylorOtwell maybe introduce some kind of a beginners plan. Dploy.io has a free beginners plan with a limitation of 1 repository.

I don't want a free one, but paying a buck or two for a limit of 1 project would suffice, and then once I get more than one project let me upgrade my subscription.

Once again great job!

@Graham Depends where you store them.

@toniperic I agree, Forge is great for setting up servers (something which we'd need to potentially do just the once).

And Envoyer is great for everyday use, but as you say, not everyone will want up to 10 projects, a smaller introductory plan would be beneficial.

Just completed a deployment with envoyer, all fairly painless after a hiccup synching environment settings.

I can see envoyer being a boon to organisations that haven't had a formal deployment process in the past, especially when used in conjunction with Homestead and Forge.

Hi,

IMHO I think the problem is related with the full process to make a Deploy of an application, when you work, as some users commented here, with only one application, and you don't require another 9 servers, you may need some hosting type Digital Ocean (min. 5 - 10$) + Forge (min. $10 because you have Unlimited Servers but those are related with your VPS from some services as Digital Ocean) + Envoyer (min. $10) without other costs associated with the maintenance of the application, at the end is a little expensive for minimal projects.

Envoyer looks almost there for me. My only question was about a failed deployment and rolling migrations.

Currently there's no way to initiate a rollback if anything after a migration fails to execute. The simple way around this would be to make the migration run just before activating the new release, which you'd think won't fail.

Guess I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but the consideration is there.

As for the $10 commitment, I don't think its a big deal. If you only need a single deploy, Envoy is what you'll need. @fideloper has a couple of free screencasts about it in servers for hackers. Envoyer is for folks that need multiple deploys to multiple servers on a consistent basis.

It's nice that Envoyer has a free five day trial, just need to marry it up with a forge one >_>

It's very cool for beginers, but for advanced users too expensive. We can use something like HUBOT, dploy, capistrano, etc. to do the same things.

@RomainLanz I would have thought the opposite, that advanced users would get the most value as they would be more likely to have multiple projects to deploy.

@codeatbusiness I can also see your point of view. For a single project, Forge and Envoyer at $20/month looks disproportionate when compared to a $10/month VM from Digital Ocean. I'm not sure how you would change that without reducing the costs of Forge/Envoyer to a point that it's hardly worth collecting.

I wonder what the economics of a $60annual single project Forge/Envoyer package would look like.

@deringer I'd be interested to hear how you plan to work around database migrations. I wonder if there's anything in the pipeline to ease that pain.

@Graham the only thought I have to minimise impact would be to make the migration task run just before the activate release task. That way you know your code has already successfully run.

The chances of the activate task failing are quite slim.

Of course, if one of your migrations fail, you'll still need to manually rollback the migration. Depending on what you've changed, you may end up with some downtime (removing a column your old code uses for example).

Perhaps @TaylorOtwell will provide an envoyer task for migrations that you can optionally run. That way it would be responsible for catching the failure and automagically rolling back.

@deringer that's almost what I did for my initial deployment. I set an update hook to run a migrate after this action 'install composer dependencies' and before 'activate new release'.

cd {{release}}

php artisan migrate

I'd probably have to give it some more thought for future deployments :-)

Perhaps there should also be a deployment hook for 'Deployment Failed'.

I'm just massively impressed with Envoyer via the screencasts. I'm a big fan of Forge and the Laravel Eco system generally and Envoyer fits in nicely.

Heartbeats and notifications are useful touches. I can particularly see how when I set up Crons to perform analytics, calculate finances and generate reports it will come in handy.

I'm particularly interested now in testing out how well provisioning one server with Laravel and another with ElasticSearch would work.

So far so good @TaylorOtwell , really excited about this.

I feel like out of the box, Envoyer.io needs to do something with the assets directory. The easiest thing I can think of would be to symlink it out like it does for storage. Currently it runs on the assumption that everything comes down from GitHub. You're really not supposed to store your assets in GitHub unless you have a specific need for it.

I setup all my stuff today on there. It's pretty slick but I had to do a bunch of manual configuration getting some dependencies installed on the machine. I was using forge too! Apparently forge doesn't come preinstalled with nodejs anymore. I had trouble getting it to work properly so I could setup bower and gulp etc.

I also had trouble getting my stuff to deploy because I wanted it to be a "dev" server but it wouldn't work because you can't modify the composer install command and i'm pretty sure it does a production install (so no dev requirements).

My last wish for envoyer is that it could come with something to manage migrations as @Graham says above.

I'm going to keep using it for now just to see how it evolves.

@coolmatty , I am not sure what you meant by "you're really not supposed to store your assets"; however, you are, in fact, supposed to do that!

Let's take a step back - Did you mean some sort of files that are not related with the code base of your project (e.g. users' profile pictures). If that's the case, I would agree that they should not be in your git repository; however, they are not consider assets. Anyhow, every single piece that is part of your domain logic and/or design should be in your git repository, that includes css, js, and images.

If you were talking about images/documents/files.. (that are not part of your design and logic) then, you'd better use a CDN or flysystem's API to manage those files (as long as we are talking about larger project). If your project is smaller, you can easily set up a symlink that points to another folder (that has the files) that is not part of the git repository.

Anyhow, I think that the price is justified! Let's think for a second - the average hourly rate for developers in US is $30-$40 per hour. If you have to spent 3 hours a year to write deployment scripts and manage deployments manually - you're already losing money because you could've used a tool that is proven to be working.

I've noticed that people complain that the price is too much if you have 1 project. I wouldn't agree more as long as that project is your blog or another small project; however, those project don't even need a deployment tool!

I am happy that we have envoyer.io !!

I didn't read every comment, but it looks amazing. I wish it was all in one service instead of layer on layer. Looks like (not that you have to have each part) Envoyer->Forge->host. But seems a few features from Envoyer and forge are redundant. Would jump in it if it was one service or deployed a lot outside of where I worked.

@coolmatty so you manually upload your assets to Forge instead of deploying them via Git? The whole point of Git is version control of source code.

I'm quite surprised people query the price of Envoyer. If you run a semi serious website then zero downtime, heartbeats and health checks is worth $10. Let's put this in Jeffrey Way speak, it's effectively buying Taylor lunch once a month.

@Graham You are totally true, it's easier to manage many deployments with this interface. If you have a lot of project that could be very nice to use.

But, if you know how HUBOT (etc.) work, it would be maybe better to have a specific script for each project.

@RomainLanz Looking at HUBOT and comparing it to Envoyer, I would guess they are targeting different ends of the market.

I hadn't looked at HUBOT or Envoyer before yesterday, it took longer to find out what HUBOT was than it did for me to deploy my first site with Envoyer.

For me the major selling point of Envoyer is its ease of use. For particularly complicated deployment scenarios that may not be the case, I'll defer to the opinion of someone with those complex type of deployments.