Hello! Heavy and happy user of Forge here. As our app is becoming too large, some side effects have come with deployment downtime.
I love everything I see about Envoyer (or similar solutions, sometimes custom built on Envoy) except one thing: the need for a complete rebuild of dependencies eg composer install + npm install.
This means our deployments would now be way longer, and even if there is no downtime anymore, deployment speed is really important for us and actually a core principle of how we manage software.
Do you have big apps with lots of dependencies running on Laravel Envoyer? If yes, how did you tackle the slower deployment time? How come we should reinstall composer dependencies when a lot of times, nothing has changed?
The concept of Envoyer is to do a symlink switch of the running application to make sure there is downtime. So basically it builds up the app in a different directory on the server. Once it's done it links the new directory to the "current" directory from your website. This way you have zero downtime. This process can take some time depending on how steps your deployment has.
Because Envoyer runs on the server it already caches your composer dependencies, so the next time you run composer install it should only install the new ones.
I would personally not bother too much about it. If you would use a different deployment solution, there would be a similar approach.
Can you share what kind of steps you take to deploy next to the default steps like composer?
