Introducing Forge Circles 0:00So far, we've been working on our own server, however, sometimes we're going to need to share our servers with colleagues, contractors or teammates. Forge allows us to share both servers and the ability for members to create servers on our behalf through a feature it calls Circles. Circles are only available if you're subscribed to the business plan, but you do not need to be subscribed to Forge to join a Circle. Circles have several benefits over account sharing. You're able to revoke a member's server access at any time, just remove them from the Circle. You don't need to share passwords and potentially risk being locked out of your own account. Forge keeps an audit log of who did what and when on each server, so using Circles, you'll Creating and Configuring Circle 0:34You don't need to share passwords and potentially risk being locked out of your own account. Forge keeps an audit log of who did what and when on each server, so using Circles, you'll be able to see exactly what changes have been made and who made them. And Circle members are not able to delete servers, only the account owner has that privilege. To create a new Circle, we need to do a couple of things. We need to firstly give it a name, so we'll call this one employees and hit create. Once the Circle has been created, we can edit it. From here, we're able to rename the Circle and we can select which servers we want to be a part of it. So we will enable the DeepSound server and also share our Hetzner Cloud credentials. Inviting Members to Circle 1:14be a part of it. So we will enable the DeepSound server and also share our Hetzner Cloud credentials. Once we've decided which servers and credentials are a part of our Circle, we can now invite people to it. Now when we invite somebody to a Circle, they do not yet need to have a Forge account. They will receive an email from Laravel Forge instructing them to either create an account if they don't have one and then to accept the invitation. I'm going to invite my good friend Taylor Otwell and hit invite. And here is the Circle invitation email. James Brooks has invited you to join their employees Circle. Accepting Invite via Signup 1:52And here is the Circle invitation email. James Brooks has invited you to join their employees Circle. If you do not have an account, you can create one by clicking the button below, after which click join Circle. Okay. So we will now create a new account, which I will do in an incognito window. And we will call it Taylor Otwell. Now keep in mind when creating the new account that the email address must match the one that has been invited. So Taylor at stressed out dot IO.that has been invited. So Taylor at stressed out dot IO. And finally the password, we need to make sure it's a secure one. Okay. And I agree to the terms of service and the privacy policy. I'll now click register. And since I've just joined Forge, it's showing me the onboarding screen where I can connect my source control and server provider details. But if I'm just joining a Circle, I can skip this step. Now initially we're not going to see any active servers because we've not yet accepted ourBut if I'm just joining a Circle, I can skip this step. Now initially we're not going to see any active servers because we've not yet accepted our Circle invitation. Let's go ahead and copy the link address and paste that in here. And just like that, we are now part of the employee Circle. We can see the owner of the account is myself, James Brooks, and I'm not able to create Circles as Taylor Otwell because he has not subscribed to a plan. Now that Taylor is part of the Circle, he could go to the service page and see the server there and also see that it is a part of the employees Circle. One of the cool things about Circles is that we can use them to filter down our servers. Managing Access and Audits 3:24there and also see that it is a part of the employees Circle. One of the cool things about Circles is that we can use them to filter down our servers. Now in this case, there's not much to see. We have one server, but we're currently looking at all servers. We could look at servers owned by us, which are none, or we could look at the employees Circle, which would just filter down servers that are part of that Circle. Clicking into the server, we can see that we can manage everything. The only thing that we can't do here as a Circle member is delete the server. That privilege is reserved only for the server owner. If we switch over to the server events page, we can see that there are already existingThat privilege is reserved only for the server owner. If we switch over to the server events page, we can see that there are already existing server events, all of which have been initiated by myself. This is because I'm the only person that's had access to this server so far. Now occasionally you might see another user that's initiated event, Laravel Forge. These typically happen when either a support agent has connected to your server or we've deployed code through a push to deploy system. So what I'm going to do here is add a new key as Taylor Otwell. I'm going to call it Taylor and add it to the Forge user, paste it in. And we can see that Taylor's key is now being installed. Creating Servers for Circle 4:33I'm going to call it Taylor and add it to the Forge user, paste it in. And we can see that Taylor's key is now being installed. And because we are part of a Circle and acting as Taylor here, if we go back to the events panel, we can see that Taylor Otwell has installed a new key. And this audit trail is very powerful when we're sharing servers with multiple people, because we're now able to see who has done what and at what time. When we created the Circle, we also shared our Hetzner Cloud credential. This means that we're able to create servers on behalf of the Circle owner. To do that, we can click on the create server button and we'll see initially that we're not subscribed to any billing plan to create servers.To do that, we can click on the create server button and we'll see initially that we're not subscribed to any billing plan to create servers. However, we'll also see that we've got this create Circle server button that we can click. And we can now select which Circle we want to create the server on, which will be the employees one and which credential we want to use. So we'll use the personal Hetzner Cloud and then we can create a server as usual. If we switch back to my James Brooks Forge user, we can then go and edit the Circle members and now see that Taylor Otwell is a Circle member. And Forge is also showing us that two-factor authentication is not enabled by Taylor. This is a really good way of making sure that your servers are as secured as possible.And Forge is also showing us that two-factor authentication is not enabled by Taylor. This is a really good way of making sure that your servers are as secured as possible. You can now go and tell your Circle members, please go and enable two-factor to secure your account.
