My Zero-Downtime Deployment Setup for Laravel
I've been deploying Laravel applications for over a decade. Started with custom bash scripts. Moved to Laravel Envoy. Then Laravel Envoyer, which worked great for a long time. Eventually moved away from it to Ploi.io so I could manage deployments and servers in one place. Each tool taught me something the previous one didn't. And the biggest lesson wasn't about tools at all. It was about the small practices around deployment that separate "mostly works" from "actually works every time." Zero-downtime deployment is widely available now. Most hosting panels and deployment services support it out of the box. But to get the most out of it, there are practices you need to get right. That's what this post covers.