Disclaimer: I'm not a Capistrano guru and not a server admin. I do know enough to get around and the strategy below works for me. If you encounter problems, feel free to create an issue. I will do my best to help you out, but can't make any promises :)

If you want to learn more about servers or zero-downtime deployments, be sure to check out ServersForHackers.com.

• Ruby 2.0 or newer (should be pre-installed on a Mac)
• A server to deploy to
• Some knowledge about servers and SSH

The script is based on version 3.4.0 of Capistrano. It might not work on older or newer versions that have breaking changes.

gem install capistrano -v 3.4.0
gem install capistrano-composer

You might need to use sudo if you get a permission error.

Your deploy user will need access to the webserver. Capistrano will use your Mac's ~/.ssh/config file and use your SSH keys. Check out these free tutorials to learn how to create and use an SSH key to login to a server. You should end up with something like this in your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host your-server.com
  HostName your-server.com
  Port 22
  User forge
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

If you are using Laravel Forge, your deploy user will likely be forge and the SSH port 22.

Make sure you can connect by running ssh your-server.com in the terminal.

Don't forget you need to store the public key on the server. See the tutorials for more info.

Configure your webserver so your website's public folder is within a current folder, for example:

/home/forge/your-website.com/current/public

To reload PHP after a deployment, we need to allow the deploy user to do this without the need to enter the sudo password. To achieve this, SSH into your server and run:

sudo visudo

You will be prompted for the sudo password.

Next, search the text for:

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

And add this below it: (make sure the username and reload command is valid for your server)

forge  ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/service php7.1-fpm reload

If you want to know a bit more about these user privileges, refer to this post on ServersForHackers.com.

Copy the Capfile and deploy folder from this repo into the root folder of your Laravel app.

In the deploy/stages folder, you will find 2 example files: production.rb and staging.rb. Each represents a server to deploy your app to and holds specific deployment settings for that server.

Running cap production deploy would use the production.rb settings, and cap staging deploy would use the staging.rb settings. Just update your-server, your-website and your-account to your needs.

server 'your-server.com', roles: %w{web}

set :application, 'your-website.com'
set :repo_url, 'git@github.com:your-account/your-website.git'
set :deploy_to, '/home/forge/your-website.com'
set :keep_releases, 3

set :laravel_artisan_flags, '--env=production'
set :reload_command, 'sudo service php7.1-fpm reload'

Also make sure the PHP reload command is valid for your server.

First, add a .env file to your website's current folder on the server, already containing the required passwords. If important passwords are missing (like the database password), deployment will fail, because the database migration step will fail.

Next, on your local machine, cd into the root folder of your project and run (for production):

cap production deploy:setup

You need to do this once for every new website you set up.

This will create a releases and shared folder, move your .env file into the shared folder and turn the current folder into a symlink to the latest release folder. Something like this (and a few more):

~/your-website.com/current -> ./releases/1234/
~/your-website.com/releases/1234/
~/your-website.com/shared/.env
~/your-website.com/shared/storage/

Everything in the shared folder will exist throughout deployments.

To deploy your latest code to the server, push it up to GitHub or BitBucket and run:

cap production deploy

You will be asked what branch you wish to deploy, just press enter to accept the default (master).

This will now:

• connect to your server
• fetch the latest changes from your (online!) git repo
• create a release folder
• run a production version of composer install, without the dev stuff
• run php artisan optimize
• migrate the database
• update the current symlink to the new release folder
• reload PHP-FPM
• clear the cache
• recache the routes and config
• restart the queue daemon (if any)

To rollback to the previous release, run:

cap production deploy:rollback

This will not rollback the database, as this might not be needed.

If you do want to rollback the database, run:

cap production db:rollback

Just be careful with that, especially in production :)

cap production cache:clear

cap production cache:routes
cap production cache:config

cap production cache:refresh

cap production queue:restart

cap production server:reload

cap production db:migrate
cap production db:rollback
cap production db:refresh
cap production db:reset
cap production db:seed

cap production deploy:down
cap production deploy:up

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.