Environments

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Introduction

As you may have noticed, projects do not contain much information or resources themselves. All of your deployments and invoked commands are stored within environments. Each project may have as many environments as needed.

Typically, you will have an environment for “production”, and a “staging” environment for testing your application. However, don’t be afraid to create more environments for testing new features without interrupting your main staging environment.

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Creating Environments

Environments may be created using the env Vapor CLI command:

vapor env my-environment

This command will add a new environment entry to your project’s vapor.yml file that you may deploy when ready:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
    my-environment:
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

In addition to our native runtimes, Vapor supports Docker image deployments. If you would like an environment to use a Docker image runtime instead of the default Vapor runtime, use the --docker option when creating your environment:

vapor env my-environment --docker

This command will create a my-environment.Dockerfile file in your application’s root directory.

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Opening Environments

Environments may be opened in your default browser using the Vapor CLI’s open command:

vapor open my-environment

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Default Environment

When executing a Vapor CLI command, Vapor CLI uses the staging environment by default:

vapor open // Opens the `staging` environment in your default browser...

vapor open production // Opens the `production` environment in your default browser...

However, within your application’s vapor.yml file, you may define a default-environment option to change the default environment for your project:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
default-environment: production
environments:
    production:
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
    my-environment:
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Environment Variables

Each environment contains a set of environment variables that provide crucial information to your application during execution, just like the variables present in your application’s local .env file.

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Vapor’s Default Environment Variables

Vapor automatically injects a variety of environment variables based on your environment’s configured cache, database, etc. As an example, by adding a cache or database key to your vapor.yml file, Vapor will inject the necessary CACHE_* and DB_* environment variables.

Here is the full list of environment variables injected by Vapor on your environment:

You will not see these environment variables when you manage your environment via Vapor CLI or Vapor UI, and any variables you manually define will override Vapor’s automatically injected variables.

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Updating Environment Variables

You may update an environment’s variables via the Vapor UI or using the env:pull and env:push CLI commands. The env:pull command may be used to pull down an environment file for a given environment:

vapor env:pull production

Once this command has been executed, a .env.{environment} file will be placed in your application’s root directory. To update the environment’s variables, simply open and edit this file. When you are done editing the variables, use the env:push command to push the variables back to Vapor:

vapor env:push production

If you are using the DotEnv library’s variable nesting feature to reference default environment variables that Vapor is injecting, you should replace these references with literal values instead. Since Vapor’s injected environment variables do not belong to the environment file, they can not be referenced using the nesting feature.

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Reserved Environment Variables

The following environment variables are reserved and may not be added to your environment:

• _HANDLER
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
• AWS_DEFAULT_REGION
• AWS_EXECUTION_ENV
• AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_MEMORY_SIZE
• AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_NAME
• AWS_LAMBDA_FUNCTION_VERSION
• AWS_LAMBDA_LOG_GROUP_NAME
• AWS_LAMBDA_LOG_STREAM_NAME
• AWS_LAMBDA_RUNTIME_API
• AWS_REGION
• AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• AWS_SESSION_TOKEN
• LAMBDA_RUNTIME_DIR
• LAMBDA_TASK_ROOT
• TZ

In addition, environment variables should not contain AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, or AWS_SESSION_TOKEN in their names. For example: MY_SERVICE_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.

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Encrypted Environment Files

Vapor provides built-in support for Laravel’s encrypted environment files. If Vapor discovers an encrypted environment file while booting your application, it will automatically attempt to decrypt it and inject the resulting variables into the runtime.

To leverage this feature, you must first ensure an encrypted environment file is present at the root of your application during deployment. For example, deploying the production environment requires a file called .env.production.encrypted to be present at the root of your application.

Additionally, you should ensure the decryption key is available in the runtime by defining it as the LARAVEL_ENV_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable via the Vapor UI or CLI.

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Passport Keys

You may easily add your project’s Passport keys to your encrypted environment file using the env:passport CLI command:

vapor env:passport production

The env:passport command will append the contents of your local Passport keys to your .env.production file. When the command completes, you should re-encrypt the environment file using Laravel’s env:encrypt command and redeploy your project in order for the changes to take effect.

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Maintenance Mode

When deploying a Laravel application using a traditional VPS like those managed by Laravel Forge, you may have used the php artisan down command to place your application in “maintenance mode”. To place a Vapor environment in maintenance mode, you may use the Vapor UI or the down CLI command:

vapor down production

To remove an environment from maintenance mode, you may use the up command:

vapor up production

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Customizing The Maintenance Mode Screen

You may customize the maintenance mode splash screen for your application by placing a 503.html file in your application’s root directory. In addition, you may also place a 503.json file in your application’s root directory for requests asking for JSON responses.

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Bypassing Maintenance Mode

You may find it useful to be able to access your site on its custom domain rather than the vanity domain while in maintenance mode. To accomplish this, you may provide a secret when invoking the down command:

vapor down --secret="example-secret"

You may then access your application using the secret key as the URL path:

https://example.com/example-secret

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Commands

Commands allow you to execute an arbitrary Artisan command against an environment. You may issue a command via the Vapor UI or using the command CLI command. The command command will prompt you for the Artisan command you would like to run:

vapor command production

vapor command production --command="php artisan inspire"

By default, your command will timeout after one minute. You can configure the timeout of your CLI commands using the cli-timeout option within your vapor.yml file. This option allows you to specify the maximum number of seconds a CLI command should be allowed to run:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        cli-timeout: 20
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

Sometimes you may need to run the previous command again. To accomplish this, you may use the Vapor UI or the command:again CLI command:

# Run the previous command again...
vapor command:again

# Run a specific command again using the command's ID...
vapor command:again 50

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Memory

Vapor (via AWS Lambda) allocates CPU power to your Lambda function in proportion to the amount of memory configured for the application. You may increase or decrease the configured memory using the memory option in your environment’s vapor.yml configuration:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        memory: 1024
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Concurrency

By default, Vapor will allow your application to process web requests at max concurrency, which is typically 1,000 requests executing at the same time at any given moment across all of your AWS Lambda functions in a given region. If you would like to reduce the maximum web concurrency, you may define the concurrency option in the environment’s vapor.yml configuration. Additionally, if you need more than 1,000 concurrent requests, you can submit a limit increase request in the AWS Support Center console.

While maximum performance is certainly appealing, in some situations it may make sense to set this value to the maximum concurrency you reasonably expect for your particular application. Otherwise, a DDoS attack against your application could result in larger than expected AWS costs:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        concurrency: 50
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Prewarming

By default, when an environment is deployed, the first request it receives may encounter “cold starts”. These requests typically incur a penalty of a few seconds while AWS loads a serverless container to serve the request. Once a request has been served by that container, it is typically kept warm to serve further requests with no delay.

To mitigate “cold starts” after a fresh deployment, Vapor allows you to define a warm configuration value for an environment in your vapor.yml file. The warm value represents how many serverless containers Vapor will “pre-warm” by making concurrent requests to the newly deployed application before it is activated for public accessibility. Vapor will continue to pre-warm this many containers every 5 minutes while the application is deployed so the specified number of containers are always ready to serve requests:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        warm: 10
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Firewall

You may instruct Vapor to automatically configure a firewall that provides basic protection against denial-of-service attacks targeting your environment, as well as protection against pervasive bot traffic that can consume your environment’s resources.

Before getting started, keep in mind that Vapor’s managed firewall inspects requests using the IP address from the web request origin. Therefore, this feature should only be used if the requests are not already being reversed proxied through a service such as Cloudflare. If you are already using a reverse proxy, you should not use this feature.

You may use Vapor’s managed firewall by defining the firewall configuration option within your application’s vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'
        firewall:
            rate-limit: 1000
            bot-control:
                - CategorySearchEngine
                - CategorySocialMedia
                - CategoryScrapingFramework

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rate-limit

When using the rate-limit option, Vapor’s managed firewall tracks the rate of requests for each originating IP address and blocks IPs with request rates over the given rate-limit value. In the example above, if the request count for an IP address exceeds 1,000 requests in any 5-minute time span then the firewall will temporarily block requests from that IP address with the 403 Forbidden HTTP status code.

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bot-control

When using the bot-control option, Vapor’s managed firewall blocks requests from pervasive bots, such as scrapers or search engines. You may customize the “category” of requests the bot-control should block by providing an array of categories within your application’s vapor.yml file:

firewall:
    bot-control:
        - CategoryAdvertising
        - CategoryArchiver
        - SignalNonBrowserUserAgent

Here is the list of available categories you may use:

Behind the scenes, Vapor’s managed firewall uses Amazon WAF, creating a Web ACL with one rate-based rule per Vapor environment. Feel free to check out the AWS WAF documentation for more information about WAF and its pricing.

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Timeout

By default, Vapor will limit web request execution time to 10 seconds. If you would like to change the timeout value, you may add a timeout value (in seconds) to the environment’s configuration. API Gateway has a maximum timeout of 30 seconds. Should you require a longer request duration, you may utilize a load balancer. Note that AWS does not allow Lambda executions to process for more than 15 minutes:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        timeout: 20
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Scheduler

Vapor automatically configures Laravel’s task scheduler and instructs it to use the DynamoDB cache driver to avoid overlapping tasks, so no other configuration is required to begin leveraging Laravel’s scheduled task feature.

If you would like to disable the scheduler, you may set an environment’s scheduler option to false:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        scheduler: false
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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Sub-Minute Scheduled Tasks

Due to AWS limitations, there is no guarantee the scheduler will be invoked at the very beginning of any given minute. Therefore, you may find that, by default, sub-minute tasks scheduled early in the schedule:run process do not run as expected and those which run later in the schedule may not start at the expected time. For example, when scheduling a command using everyThirtySeconds and assuming the scheduler is invoked by AWS at 12:00:10, you should expect your command to run at 12:00:10 and 12:00:40.

To work around these limitations for sub-minute tasks, you may enable Vapor’s own scheduler engine by adding scheduler: sub-minute to your application’s vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        scheduler: sub-minute
        cli-timeout: 120

When Vapor’s sub-minute scheduler is enabled, Vapor runs its own scheduler command which waits until the beginning of every minute before calling schedule:run. Therefore, when enabling this option, you should also ensure your cli-timeout is >= 120 to allow enough time to both invoke Laravel’s scheduler and allow it to complete all sub-minute tasks. You should also ensure cli-concurrency is >= 2 to allow for the possibility of overlapping invocations of Vapor’s scheduler.

In addition, the runInBackground option is not supported on Vapor; therefore, you may find some of your tasks are blocked from running if the previous task runs longer than expected.

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Mail

Laravel provides a clean, simple email API. And, by default, Vapor will automatically configure your environment to use Amazon SES as the default mail driver by injecting the proper Laravel environment variables during deployment. Of course, you may change the default mail driver by defining a different value for the MAIL_MAILER environment variable.

If you plan to use Amazon SES as your application’s mail service, you should first ensure the MAIL_MAILER environment variable is set and it contains the value ses. Next, you should attach a domain to your environment. Once attached and deployed, Vapor will automatically update the domain’s DNS records so Amazon SES can validate the domain and configure DKIM. These DNS records are necessary to protect your reputation as a sender.

By default, Vapor configures the “From Address” and “From Name” Laravel configuration settings with [email protected] and Your Project Name, respectively. Of course, you’re free to modify these values by defining new values for the MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS and MAIL_FROM_NAME environment variables.

Finally, if you haven’t used Amazon SES before, your SES account will be in “sandbox” mode. Sandbox mode only allows you to send emails to manually verified domains. To move out of SES sandbox mode, follow these instructions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request-production-access.html.

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Metrics

A variety of environment performance metrics may be found in the Vapor UI or using the metrics CLI command:

vapor metrics production
vapor metrics production 5m
vapor metrics production 30m
vapor metrics production 1h
vapor metrics production 8h
vapor metrics production 1d
vapor metrics production 3d
vapor metrics production 7d
vapor metrics production 1M

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Alarms

You may configure alarms for all environment metrics using the Vapor UI. These alarms will notify you via the notification method of your choice when an alarm’s configured threshold is broken and when an alarm recovers.

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Runtime

The runtime configuration option allows you to specify the runtime a given environment runs on.

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Native Runtimes

The currently supported native runtimes are php-8.1:al2, php-8.2:al2, php-8.2:al2-arm, php-8.3:al2, and php-8.3:al2-arm. The runtimes that are suffixed with al2 use Amazon Linux 2 while those without the suffix use Amazon Linux 1. Runtimes without the -arm suffix run on x86 artchitecture whereas those suffixed with -arm run on Arm architecture. Arm provides performance benefits and cost savings compared to its x86 equivalent:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        runtime: 'php-8.2:al2'
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

The following limitations apply to Vapor native runtimes:

• The application size, including the runtime itself, must not exceed 250MB.
• Additional PHP extensions or libraries (such as imagick) can not be installed.

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Customizing Core php.ini Directives

To customize core php.ini directives on our native runtimes, create a php.ini file in the php/conf.d directory of your project with the desired directives. For example, to change the upload_max_filesize, add the following line to your application’s php.ini file:

upload_max_filesize = 4M

After deploying, the new directive will take effect in your Vapor environment.

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Docker Runtimes

Docker based runtimes allow you to package and deploy applications up to 10GB in size and allow you to install additional PHP extensions or libraries by updating the environment’s corresponding .Dockerfile. For every new Docker based environment, Vapor creates a .Dockerfile file within your application that uses one of Vapor’s base images as a starting point for building your image. All of Vapor’s Docker images are based on Alpine Linux:

FROM laravelphp/vapor:php82

COPY . /var/task

Vapor’s Docker runtimes also support Arm architecture, which provides increased performance and cost savings. If you want to take advantage of Arm architecture, you should update your base image as follows:

FROM laravelphp/vapor:php82-arm

COPY . /var/task

If you would like to use a Docker image instead of the Vapor native runtimes, you should set your vapor.yml configuration file’s runtime option to docker (for x86 architecture) or docker-arm (for Arm architecture):

# x86
id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        runtime: docker
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

# Arm
id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        runtime: docker-arm
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

If you would like to rename the Dockerfile or use a shared Dockerfile across multiple environments, you may define a dockerfile option within your vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        runtime: docker
        dockerfile: vapor.Dockerfile
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

Vapor will build, tag, and publish your environment’s image during your deployments; therefore, you should ensure that you have installed Docker on your local machine. Vapor’s base Docker images are:

• laravelphp/vapor:php74
• laravelphp/vapor:php80
• laravelphp/vapor:php81
• laravelphp/vapor:php82
• laravelphp/vapor:php82-arm
• laravelphp/vapor:php83
• laravelphp/vapor:php83-arm

Of course, you are free to modify your environment’s Dockerfile to install additional dependencies or PHP extensions. Here are a few examples:

FROM laravelphp/vapor:php81

# Add the `ffmpeg` library...
RUN apk --update add ffmpeg

# Add the `mysql` client...
RUN apk --update add mysql-client

# Add the `gmp` PHP extension...
RUN apk --update add gmp gmp-dev
RUN docker-php-ext-install gmp

# Place application in Lambda application directory...
COPY . /var/task

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Customizing Core php.ini Directives

To customize core php.ini directives on our Docker runtimes, create a php.ini file in the root directory of your project with the desired directives. For example, to change the upload_max_filesize directive, add the following line to your php.ini file:

upload_max_filesize = 4M

Next, in your Dockerfile, include a new COPY command that copies the local php.ini file into the Docker image:

FROM laravelphp/vapor:php81

COPY ./php.ini /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/overrides.ini

COPY . /var/task

After deploying, the new directive will take effect in your Vapor environment.

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Docker Build Arguments

When using Docker, is common to use ARG instructions in .Dockerfile files to define build-time variables:

ARG VERSION=php81

FROM laravelphp/vapor:${VERSION}

COPY . /var/task

You may set Docker build arguments via the docker-build-args configuration option within your application’s vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        runtime: docker
        docker-build-args:
            VERSION: php81
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

Alternatively, you may provide one or multiple --build-arg options to the deploy Vapor CLI command to specify the values of the build arguments:

vapor deploy --build-arg VERSION=php74 --build-arg KEY=value

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Octane

By default, when Lambda receives HTTP requests, Vapor sends those requests synchronously to PHP-FPM using the FastCGI Protocol. This means every incoming request spawns a PHP-FPM worker and boots your application. This approach ensures Vapor behaves exactly like a traditional web server.

If you wish to reduce the overhead involved in using PHP-FPM, you may opt-in to Laravel Octane support on Vapor. Octane can increase your application’s performance by booting your application once, keeping it in memory, and then feeding that same application instance requests as they are received.

To get started, install Laravel Octane in your project. After installing Octane, don’t forget to review important Octane documentation topics such as dependency injection and managing memory leaks.

Finally, you may instruct Vapor to use Octane by setting the octane configuration option within your application’s vapor.yml file:

id: 1
name: my-application
environments:
    staging:
        memory: 1024
        runtime: 'php-8.2:al2'
        octane: true

In addition, if your project uses a database, you may use the octane-database-session-persist and octane-database-session-ttl options to instruct Octane that database connections should be reused between requests:

        database: my-database
        octane: true
        octane-database-session-persist: true
        octane-database-session-ttl: 10

• The octane-database-session-persist option indicates that database connections should persist between requests. The main purpose of this option is to reduce the overhead involved on creating a database connection on each request.
• The octane-database-session-ttl option allows specifying the time (in seconds) the Lambda container should stay connected to the database when the Lambda container is not being used. This option is only available for MySQL fixed size databases.

We recommended that you specify an octane-database-session-ttl value; otherwise, the Lambda container will stay connected to your database until the Lambda container gets destroyed. This may take several minutes and may result in your database becoming overwhelmed with active connections.

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Gateway Versions

By default, Vapor routes HTTP traffic to your serverless applications using AWS API Gateway v1 (REST APIs). Your application may run on either API Gateway v1 (REST APIs) or API Gateway v2 (HTTP APIs). By default, applications deploy using API Gateway v1 as it provides a fuller feature set such as Vapor’s managed Firewall, and more.

However, API Gateway v2 offers a cost reduction per million requests to your application ($1.00 per million vs.$3.50 per million). If you would like to use API Gateway v2, you may specify the gateway-version configuration option for a given environment in your vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        gateway-version: 2
        build:
            - 'composer install --no-dev'

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HTTP to HTTPS Redirection With API Gateway v2

If you choose to use API Gateway v2 and would like to support HTTP to HTTPS redirection, we currently suggest using Cloudflare as an external DNS provider for your Vapor application. Cloudflare not only provides DNS, but serves as a reverse proxy to your application and features an option for automatic HTTP to HTTPS redirection.

After a Vapor deployment is completed, Vapor will provide you with CNAME records for the domain(s) associated with your environment. These records will point the domain to your Lambda application. You should manually add these values as CNAME records within the Cloudflare DNS dashboard.

In addition, when using Cloudflare, you should set your Cloudflare SSL / TLS mode to “Full”. The “Always Use HTTPS” configuration option may be found under the SSL / TLS menu’s “Edge Certificates” tab.

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Custom VPCs

If you want to place your Lambda functions within a VPC that is not managed by Vapor, you may specify the subnets and security-groups configuration options for a given environment in your vapor.yml file:

id: 2
name: vapor-laravel-app
environments:
    production:
        subnets:
            - subnet-08aczain4man8bba7
            - subnet-08acr4nd0mbba7
        security-groups:
            - sg-0cr4and0m45b7e0

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Deleting Environments

Environments may be deleted via the Vapor UI or using the env:delete CLI command:

vapor env:delete testing