Level 16
I guess fortrabbit and forge are among the most used hosting options for laravel. Together with github or bitbucket for git repository.
Jul 12, 2016
6
Level 20
Project hosting and deployment solutions
I am looking for some recommendations, suggestions and feedback on project hosting and deployment solutions.
We are a medium size business with a small team of developers (3). We currently work locally and push code to a mercurial repository on a single branch hosted on a private server. The code is then deployed to production manually via the command line. There is little testing or code checking other than on the local development environment.
We are moving our whole application to new servers, and at the same time are looking to improve our development work flow and process and take advantage of some of the existing solutions. We want to start using branches and code reviews etc.
The workflow we plan on following is:
local development environment -> staging branch (auto deployed to staging environment) -> production environment
We have done a lot of research and of the solutions we have found GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk stand out.
Some of the question we have are: For a small business, what are the benefits of hosting the project on a private server vs using a cloud solution? From BitBucket / GitHub, what are the best ways to deploy code to a staging environment on commit, and then to production after approval? Beanstalk offers deployment options that seem useful, but BitBucket and GitHub appear to be slightly better for other aspects. Does anyone have any advice, or feedback based on previous or current experience?
Any feedback or advice is greatly appreciated.
Level 75
For a real site and not one these little blog hobby sites I would seriously consider hiring a consultant to help you. Just make sure you get a free estimate.
Level 80
@coxy121 Personally I use Bitbucket (which has support for Mercurial, although I use Git) and then Heroku or Viaduct for hosting. As they’re cloud-based, deploying is essentially pushing to a Git repository (Viaduct you have to set up deploy-on-push, but it’s easy to do so).
In my “proper” job, we again use Bitbucket (they’re big on Atlassian so also use JIRA), but we then deploy to a cluster on AWS. What we have on AWS is overkill for most applications though. Our environment’s been set up to cope with millions of users, which is premature in my personal opinion but then DevOps is not my remit in the business ;)
Level 20
@martinbean thanks. For personal projects I use both GitHub and Bitbucket with Git. For the business I am working for, I would like to move over to using Git from Mercurial.
I do like Bitbucket especially for the price for the business. I am toying with the idea of hosting it on one of our servers which is only a one off $10. I just need to look in to deployment options. Our plan it to auto deploy to the staging environment once a branch has been merged to the development branch. Then we would do a manual deployment to production once the branch has been approved and merged to the production branch. Deploybot looks good, but $15 a month.
Level 9
The cost of using the Laravel tools specifically designed to help you should only run up $25 (Github Enterprise [5 users]), $10 (Forge), $10 (Envoyer).
So $45 a month for hosted code repo's with deployment tools designed to work with it. I use this setup (personally) with DigitalOcean and MS Azure (professionally) as a host and it has been an exceptionally good experience.
I would also add that repository backup should be considered and either use a local for production and Github for backup or vice versa. D
Level 20
@davidpiesse thanks, I will look in to Envoyer. I noticed there is a Laracast series on it too, which I am about to watch.
Our current servers are load balanced dedicated servers and not VPS so unfortunately Forge is not an option at this point, although I plan to explore this for personal projects.
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