Look, I’m the type of person who likes to mess around with different side projects that never end up seeing the light of day. My GitHub looks like a graveyard of half-finished projects, and over these years of building these forgotten side projects, I’ve learned one crucial lesson: time spent on DevOps is time not spent on building cool stuff.
That might be because I am really bad at provisioning and managing my servers, or because right now it seems to be a full-time job.
That's where Laravel Forge comes in – and honestly, it's been a game-changer for developers like me who'd rather write code than wrestle with server configurations.
The Problem with Traditional Deployment
Let’s call a spade, a spade. Most of us developers didn't sign up to become Linux sysadmins. We want to build applications, not spend hours figuring out why our SSL certificate isn't working or why our database connection keeps timing out.
I used to deploy my Laravel apps the "traditional" way: spinning up a DigitalOcean droplet, SSH-ing in, installing PHP, MySQL, Nginx, configuring everything manually, and inevitably breaking something in the process. Then spending another few hours Googling error messages and questioning my life choices.
Granted, while I’m spending more time on ChatGPT rather than Stackoverflow, I still find myself searching for the same solutions to weird memory limitations, obscure firewall rules, SSL, or project settings that take the entire app down, and the list goes on. It’s just not fun.
I love this representation because I feel it's pretty accurate. Reddit Agrees
Enter Laravel Forge
Forge is basically Taylor Otwell saying "Hey, I know you just want to deploy your app without losing your sanity." It's a server management service that handles all the boring stuff so you can focus on what actually matters - your application.
LaravelForge offers a few things out of the box like zero-config server setup, dead simple deployments, stuff that you don’t want to think about like backups, server monitoring and alerts, SSL renewals, and much more.
Now I know what you are thinking, Forge is not the only solution out there. And that’s true, it’s not necessarily the right fit for everyone. Let me break down what’s actually happening in the server provisioning world and why so many of us Laravel devs keep running into the same headaches.
The DIY Route
The real issue isn’t that server management is impossible; it’s that there are about 50 different things that can silently break, and you won’t know about most of them until 2 AM and you have a flight leaving at 6:30 AM the next morning. Ok, maybe that’s just me.
The security minefield is another issue. Think about it, you spin an Ubuntu server, and out of the box, it basically screams “Hack me!”. Default SSH config, open ports you never knew existed, firewall rules that make no sense. I once spent an entire weekend figuring out a database accessibility issue that turned out to be a misconfigured bind address, so my machine kept throwing “localhost refused to connect” errors.
Then there is the environment hell where your machine runs PHP 8.2, but your server defaults to 7.4, and some obscure dependency won’t work on a newer version of PHP. File permissions are either too restrictive or too permissive. Going from “I can’t access my own photos” to “now, everyone can see my selfies” in an instant.
And even when everything else works great, there’s a dance that happens with every deployment, SSH in, Git pull, run composer, clear cache, restart queue workers, pray nothing breaks, etc. Miss one step and your app is down for good. Automate it wrong, and you’re debugging shell scripts just like our ancestors.
Saving my Sanity
The real question isn't "what's the best deployment strategy" but rather "what lets me focus on building instead of maintaining?”
It comes down to my priorities. Am I building projects because I want to learn DevOps or am I ok being ignorant and just focusing on my app?
I figured out that I spent about 25-30% of my time on operational tasks and not coding, which I did not enjoy at all.
So it became clear.
I just want things to work. I don’t care to learn the intricacies of server management as long as it just works. Forge does just that: Laravel bliss without the drama.
The New Forge
There’s a new version of Forge that’s a game-changer for developers like me.
This video covers most of the cool new things.
Instant VPS Provisioning
The biggest time saver is Laravel VPS - you can create a server directly from Forge without ever touching DigitalOcean’s interface. What took me about an hour or two is now done in 10 seconds.
This means that I can go from an idea to a live server faster than I can finish making my coffee.
Zero-Downtime Deployments
This now comes out of the box. Previously, you needed to use a separate service like Envoyer. This means that I can deploy updates during peak traffic without breaking the experience for anyone. No more scheduling deployments around user downtime periods or being scared of pushing code to production.
Enhanced Deployment Visibility
You’ll also get better tracking of what’s happening during deployments with clear visibility into which commits are being deployed, the order of the deployments in queue, and the real-time status of each deployment. And you also get full rollback capabilities if something goes wrong.
Here’s a quick video on what the setup looks like:
The new Forge essentially removes the last friction points in Laravel deployment. You're not just getting faster server provisioning - you're getting a deployment experience that matches the speed of your development cycle.
For side projects where time is your most valuable resource, these improvements mean more time building features and less time babysitting deployments. The zero-downtime feature alone makes your side projects feel more professional and reliable to users.
My two cents
Look, I'm not saying Forge is magic (though it feels like it sometimes). If you're a DevOps engineer or you genuinely enjoy server management, maybe Forge isn't for you. But if you're like me, a developer who just wants to build cool stuff without the operational overhead, then Forge is absolutely worth every penny.
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