🚀 Quick Tutorial: Deploying Laravel with Laravel Cloud in Under 5 Minutes

After days of wrestling with deployment options for two Laravel apps (for a coding test, no less), I finally found the setup that delivered—fast, clean, and zero terminal required. The MVP? Laravel Cloud, paired with some AI for sanity checks.

No VPS. No shared hosting. No shell scripts. Just a browser and a GitHub account.

Here’s how it unfolded 👇

🌐 The Workflow That Actually Worked

1. Signed in to Laravel Cloud – Quick account setup and added a payment method (they’ve got a generous free tier too).

2. Created New Application – Clicked + New Application, picked my GitHub repo, chose a region, and gave it a name.

3. Configured My Environment – Laravel Cloud auto-detected my app’s framework and set up the environment. I just adjusted the PHP version and added a few environment variables (via the UI).

4. Deployed with One Click – Hit the shiny "Deploy" button. Five minutes later, both apps were live—with SSL, workers, and database setup done for me.

🤖 Where AI Came In
Before deploying, I used AI to:

• Review .env configs and permissions
• Suggest better database connection strategies
• Sanity-check middleware and routes

That combo—Laravel Cloud + AI—kept me in flow, made debugging almost frictionless, and freed me up to focus on code, not infrastructure.

💭 Final Thoughts
This wasn’t just a deployment win—it was a mindset shift. Tools like Laravel Cloud let you move fast without compromising control or clarity. And when paired with AI, your dev workflow feels streamlined in a way it probably hasn’t for a long time.

If you’ve been grinding through shared hosting panels or fiddling with VPS configs just to launch a test app—do yourself a favor. Let Laravel Cloud (and a little AI intuition) take it from here.