Laravel Vapor

# Deployments

# Introduction

Of course, one of the primary features of Laravel Vapor is atomic, zero-downtime deployments. Unlike many other features of Vapor, deployments are only initiated via the Vapor CLI. During deployment, Vapor will run the build steps of your vapor.yml file on the local machine that the deployment is running on. This might be your personal machine or a continuous integration platform.

# Initiating Deployments

To initiate a deployment, execute the deploy CLI command from the root of your application:

vapor deploy production

Application Size

AWS Lambda has strict limitations on the size of applications running within the environment. If your application exceeds this limit, you may take advantage of Vapor's Docker based deployments (opens new window). Docker based deployments allow you to package and deploy applications up to 10GB in size.

# Build Hooks

You may define build hooks for an environment using the build key within your vapor.yml file. These commands are executed on the local machine that the deployment is running on and may be used to prepare your application for deployment. During deployment, your application is built within a temporary .vapor directory that is created by the CLI and all of your build commands will run within that temporary directory:

id: 3
name: vapor-app
environments:
    production:
        memory: 1024
        database: vapor-app
        cache: vapor-cache
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
            - 'php artisan event:cache'
        deploy:
            - 'php artisan migrate --force'

# Deploy Hooks

You may define deployment hooks for an environment using the deploy key within your vapor.yml file. These commands are executed against the deployed environment before it is activated for general availability. If any of these commands fail, the deployment will not be activated.

id: 3
name: vapor-app
environments:
    production:
        memory: 1024
        database: vapor-app
        cache: vapor-cache
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
            - 'php artisan event:cache'
        deploy:
            - 'php artisan migrate --force'

# Reviewing Output / Logs

When a deployment hook fails, you may review the output / logs via the Vapor UI's deployment detail screen.

Also, if you are deploying your application using the vapor deploy command, the CLI output will contain the failing hook output. Of course, you may review the output at any time using the hook:output command:

vapor hook:output {DEPLOYMENT_HOOK_ID}

You can review the logs associated with the failing hook using the hook:log command:

vapor hook:log {DEPLOYMENT_HOOK_ID}

Squashed Database Migrations

Native Vapor runtimes (opens new window) do not support squashed migrations (opens new window). If you wish to utilize this feature of Laravel, you may take advantage of Vapor's Docker based deployments (opens new window)

# Assets

During deployment, Vapor will automatically extract all of the assets in your Laravel project's public directory and upload them to S3. In addition, Vapor will create a AWS CloudFront (CDN) distribution to distribute these assets efficiently around the world.

Because all of your assets will be served via S3 / CloudFront, you should always generate URLs to these assets using Laravel's asset helper. Vapor injects an ASSET_URL environment variable which Laravel's asset helper will use when constructing your URLs:

<img src="{{ asset('img.jpg') }}">

On subsequent deployments, only the assets that have changed will be uploaded to S3, while unchanged assets will be copied over from the previous deployment.

# Custom Asset Domains

If you would like to use your own domain to serve your assets, you may do so by attaching a custom asset domain to your project. First, you should ensure a DNS zone exists for the domain and that a certificate is issued for the domain in the us-east-1 region.

Next, set the asset-domain option of your vapor.yml file to your chosen domain:

id: 3
name: vapor-app
asset-domain: assets.laravel.rocks
environments:
    production:
        ...

During a subsequent deployment of any environment associated with your project, Vapor will add the custom domain as an alias to your CloudFront distribution. Vapor will also inject the relevant environment variables for the asset helper (opens new window) and Vite asset compilation process to ensure your assets are served from your custom asset domain.

# Referencing Assets From JavaScript

If you are referencing your project's public assets in your JavaScript code, you may generate URLs to these assets using Vapor's NPM package. This package includes a Vapor.asset helper that will behave like Laravel's asset helper but on the client. To get started, install the laravel-vapor NPM package:

npm install --save-dev laravel-vapor

Next, within your application's app.js file, initialize the global Vapor JavaScript object:

window.Vapor = require('laravel-vapor');

Finally, you may call the Vapor.asset helper in your JavaScript code:

$('#container').prepend($('<img>', { src: Vapor.asset('avatar.png') }))

Or, if you are using Vue, you may find it convenient to add the following mixin to your Vue application:

Vue.mixin({
    methods: {
        asset: window.Vapor.asset
    },
});

// Within your Vue components...
<img :src="asset('img/global/logo.svg')"/>

Vapor With Laravel Vite

If you are using Laravel Vite with your project, you only need to utilize the asset helper when you are referencing assets you don't want bundled, such as those that already live in your public directory.

If you want to use the asset helper with your Vite project, you will also need to specify the base URL for assets in your application's entry point, for example in your resources/js/app.js, like so: Vapor.withBaseAssetUrl(import.meta.env.VITE_VAPOR_ASSET_URL)

# Asset Compilation

If you are compiling your application's assets in one of the build steps listed in your vapor.yml configuration file, you may need your build script to be able to access your environment variables. An excellent example of this requirement is instantiating a frontend SDK such as Pusher.

Build steps are executed in the environment where a deployment is initiated - typically, this will be your local machine or your CI pipeline. As such, you must ensure the required environment variables are available in that environment.

To assist with this, Vapor will attempt to load variables first from .env.[environment] (e.g. .env.staging). If that file does not exist, Vapor will attempt to load variables from the .env file. You should ensure one of these file contains all of the environment variables needed by that environment's build script.

When using CI platforms, you may not have access to the environment files as these are typically omitted from version control. In this scenario, your CI provider will typically provide a mechanism for injecting variables into the build pipeline. For instance, with GitHub Actions, your GitHub Action configuration might look like the following:

- name: Deploy Environment
        run: vapor deploy production
        env:
            VITE_PUSHER_APP_KEY: ${{ secrets.VITE_PUSHER_APP_KEY }}

Vapor With Laravel Vite

When using Vite and running npm run build, Vite will always use the .env.production file if it is present, even if you are deploying a different environment. If you maintain multiple environment files in your deployment environment, you should set the Vite build mode explicitly:

npm run build -- --mode staging

# Code Splitting / Dynamic Imports With Mix

If you are taking advantage of JavaScript dynamic imports and code splitting in your project via Laravel Mix, you will need to let Webpack know where the child chunks will be loaded from for each deployment. To accomplish this, you can take advantage of the ASSET_URL variable that Laravel Vapor injects into your environment during your build step:

const mix = require("laravel-mix");

/*
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 | Mix Asset Management
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
 | Mix provides a clean, fluent API for defining some Webpack build steps
 | for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Sass
 | file for the application as well as bundling up all the JS files.
 |
 */

mix
  .js("resources/js/app.js", "public/js")
  .sass("resources/sass/app.scss", "public/css");

if (mix.inProduction()) {
    const ASSET_URL = process.env.ASSET_URL + "/";

    mix.webpackConfig(webpack => {
        return {
            plugins: [
                new webpack.DefinePlugin({
                    "process.env.ASSET_PATH": JSON.stringify(ASSET_URL)
                })
            ],
            output: {
                publicPath: ASSET_URL
            }
        };
    });
}

# Hot Module Replacement With Mix

If you are using code splitting and "hot module replacement" with Laravel Mix during local development, you will need to use the mix helper locally and the asset helper when deploying to Vapor:

@if (app()->environment('local'))
    <link href="{{ mix('css/admin/app.css') }}" rel="stylesheet">
    <script src="{{ mix('js/admin/app.js') }}"></script>
@else
    <link href="{{ asset('css/admin/app.css') }}" rel="stylesheet">
    <script src="{{ asset('js/admin/app.js') }}" defer></script>
@endif

# URLs Within CSS

Sometimes, your CSS may need to reference asset URLs, such as a background-image property that references an image via URL. Obviously, you are not able to use the PHP asset helper within your CSS. For this reason, Vapor will automatically prepend the correct asset base URL to all relative URLs in your CSS during the build process. After your build steps have executed, Vapor performs this action against any CSS files in your application's public directory (including directories nested under public).

# Root Domain Assets

Some applications, such as PWAs, may need to serve certain assets from the root domain. If your application has this need, you can define an array of assets that should be served from your application's root domain via the serve_assets configuration option within your vapor configuration file:

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Servable Assets
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here you can configure list of public assets that should be servable
| from your application's domain instead of only being servable via
| the public S3 "asset" bucket or the AWS CloudFront CDN network.
|
*/

'serve_assets' => [
    'serviceWorker.js',
],

If your application doesn't contain a vapor configuration file, you can publish it using the vendor:publish Artisan command:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=vapor-config

Performance Penalty

Due to the serverless nature of applications powered by Vapor, assets served from the root domain are not cacheable at the client-side and they are served using Laravel routes. Therefore, you should only serve assets that absolutely must be served from the root domain as there is a slight performance penalty for doing so.

# Dot Files As Assets

Typically, "dot" files are not uploaded to the AWS CloudFront CDN by Vapor. However, if you need the public directory's dot files to be uploaded as assets, you should set the dot-files-as-assets key to true in your vapor.yml file:

id: 1
name: app-test
dot-files-as-assets: true

You may also choose to serve asset dot files from the application's root domain:

'serve_assets' => [
    'serviceWorker.js',
    '.well-known/assetlinks.json',
],

# Redeploying

Sometimes you may need to simply redeploy a given environment without rebuilding it. For example, you may wish to do this after updating an environment variable. To accomplish this, you may use the Vapor UI or the redeploy CLI command:

vapor redeploy production

# Rollbacks

To rollback to a previous deployment, you may select the deployment in the Vapor UI and click the "Rollback To" button, or you may use the rollback CLI command. The rollback command's "--select" option will allow you to select which deployment to rollback to from a list of recent deployments. If the rollback command is executed without this option, it will simply rollback to the most previous successful deployment:

vapor rollback production

vapor rollback production --select

Variables, Secrets, & Rollbacks

When rolling back to a previous deployment, Vapor will use the environment's variables and secrets as they existed at the time the deployment you're rolling back to was originally deployed.

# Deploying From CI

So far, we have discussed deploying Vapor projects from your local command line. However, you may also deploy them from a CI platform of your choice. Since the Vapor CLI client is part of your Composer dependencies, you may simply execute the vapor deploy command in your CI platform's deployment pipeline.

In order to authenticate with Vapor from your CI platform, you will need to add a VAPOR_API_TOKEN environment variable to your CI build environment. You may generate an API token in your Vapor API settings dashboard (opens new window).

# Git Commit Information

Some CI platforms expose the Git commit information as environment variables during your build. You may pass this information to the vapor deploy command. For example, if using CodeShip:

vapor deploy production --commit="${CI_COMMIT_ID}" --message="${CI_MESSAGE}"

# Example With GitHub Actions

If your application uses GitHub Actions (opens new window) as its CI platform, the following guidelines will assist you in configuring Vapor deployments so that your application is automatically deployed when someone pushes a commit to the master branch:

  1. First, add the VAPOR_API_TOKEN environment variable to your "GitHub > Project Settings > Secrets" settings so that GitHub can authenticate with Vapor while running actions.

  2. Next, create a deploy.yml file within the your-project/.github/workflows directory. The file should have the following contents:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/[email protected]
      - name: Setup PHP
        uses: shivammathur/setup-[email protected]
        with:
          php-version: 8.0
          tools: composer:v2
          coverage: none
      - name: Require Vapor CLI
        run: composer global require laravel/vapor-cli
      - name: Install Project Dependencies
        run: composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader
      - name: Deploy Environment
        run: vapor deploy
        env:
          VAPOR_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VAPOR_API_TOKEN }}
  1. Finally, you can edit the deploy.yml file to fit your application's deployment needs, as it may require a different PHP version or a library like npm. Once you are done, commit and push the deploy.yml file to master so GitHub Actions can run the first deployment job.

# Docker Arm Runtime

Since GitHub actions run on the x86_64 architecture, they are unable to natively compile arm64 based images. In order to compile the docker-arm runtime, the arm64 platform can be emulated using QEMU. To get started, add the following to your deploy.yml, directly after the "Checkout Code" step:

- name: Setup QEMU
  uses: docker/setup-qemu-[email protected]
  with:
    platforms: arm64

# Example With Chipper CI

If your application uses Chipper CI (opens new window) as its CI platform, the following guidelines will assist you in configuring Vapor deployments so that your application is automatically deployed when someone pushes a commit to the master branch:

  1. First, add the VAPOR_API_TOKEN environment variable to your "Chipper CI > Project Settings > Project Environment Variables" settings so that Chipper CI can authenticate with Vapor while running your build pipeline.

  2. Then, on the "Build Pipeline" dashboard, add a step with the name Deploy and the following content:

if [[ $CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == 'master' ]]; then
    composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader

    composer global require laravel/vapor-cli

    vapor deploy
fi
  1. Next, commit and push any change to the master branch so that Chipper CI will deploy your application.

Docker Based Runtimes

If you plan to use Docker based runtimes to run your Vapor application, you must purchase a Chipper CI paid plan and enable Docker in each project that contains a Docker based Vapor application.

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