Learn Laravel Forge

To get started, let's review the basic set of features that Forge provides out of the box.

In this lesson, we'll discuss why you should consider Forge in the first place. Why not build up a Digital Ocean box yourself? Well, as you'll find, it can be a bit overwhelming and cumbersome to do manually.

Let's setup our first project with Laravel Forge. Once registered, within minutes, we'll deploy a fresh PHP 7.2 application.

A common task, when working with Forge, is to point a domain name to a specific server. In this lesson, I'll demonstrate exactly how.

When working with a team of developers, you'll likely find yourself in the position of wanting to grant them access to your servers. Let's learn how.

A load balancer can help us maintain and manage the incoming traffic we receive, and distribute it between any number of servers.

In this episode, we'll review how to manage our database and database users through Laravel Forge.

When working with PHP projects, you might come to a point where you need to adjust certain configuration values from your PHP settings.

In this lesson, we'll review Forge's PHP tab, where we can configure the maximum file upload size, as well as OPcache - a tool for storing compiled PHP code in memory for the purposes of improving performance.

Forge's scheduler is incredibly powerful. Here, you can configure and schedule any recurring tasks for your server, such as sending weekly reports, backing up your database, or deleting temporary files.

When you need to have one application or process running in the background constantly, you may configure a daemon through Laravel Forge.

If you have multiple servers on the same provider, then you might want to use these servers in a combined network. Forge makes this a breeze!

Let's imagine that you're working on a Forge server, and need to install a custom PHP extension. This is where Forge Recipes come into play.

We've already discussed how to use existing providers like GitHub with Laravel Forge. However, you can also use your own custom providers.

To receive status updates for each new deployment, Laravel Forge offers optional notifications. Here, you can configure email, Slack, Hipchat, or Stride alerts.

Your Laravel application is now live. Let's imagine that, a few months later, you change email or logging providers. When switching to this new service, you'll typically be given a private API authorization key. Rather than hard-coding these keys into your PHP code, a better alternative is to store then within an .env file. Using Forge, we can easily update this configuration file on the fly.

Queues allow us to push time-consuming tasks to a background job, where they can be processed by a worker. This allows for a snappier feedback loop for your users.

Registering an SSL certificate on your server is usually a tricky and confusing process. But not with Laravel Forge!

Once your domain is configured with Laravel Forge, you can optionally configure a redirect to point non-www traffic to the www version, or of course the other way around. Let's learn how to do this in Forge.

Just as you can edit the php.ini file on your server through Laravel Forge, the same is true for your Nginx configuration.

It will come as no surprise that Forge offers an API to programmatically access all operations that can be accomplished through the browser. This means, if you wish, you can build your own applications and services on top of Forge.