Typical Deployment Process

@fsdolphin I develop and test locally, with either a VM or the built in php server. Once I'm pretty sure things work I push to my repository. After that I can pull down on my dev/test server to make sure everything works, or on production to deploy. I don't work on code other than on my local setup and always just push to repository (a Gitlab instance on a hosted server). But I also work alone so your situation might be different.

Deployment process depends heavily on the app and how much time/money you are willing to spend on automating the deployment process.

For projects where a couple seconds downtime for a deployment isn't an issue writing a small envoy script that:

• Log into the server
• Changes to the project directory
• Runs php artisan down
• Does a git pull
• Runs php artisan migrate
• Clears and caches and runs any other scripts you need it to.
• Runs php artisan up

This is generally all I need for most of the small apps I work on.

If a very brief downtime is not acceptable for your app then you need something more complicated that basically deploys your new version to a separate directory and swaps symlinks to the new directory rather than updates the app in place. This also makes rollbacks a bit easier/quicker.

This could be something like Capistrano or Rocketeer.

The easy and not very expensive solution is to use https://envoyer.io/

Thank you all for your input, it helps a lot.