#Deploying on Laravel Cloud

Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform — it handles infrastructure, autoscaling, zero-downtime deployments, and SSL automatically. This guide covers everything from creating an application to going live.

#1. Create an application

In the Laravel Cloud dashboard, click New Application. Connect your GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket account, select your repository, name the application, and pick a Region close to your users.

Cloud creates a default environment for you automatically and sets it up ready to configure.

#2. Select a PHP version

In your environment's General Settings, choose PHP 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, or 8.5. Use whatever matches your local setup or your composer.json minimum.

#3. Configure environment variables

Add your variables under Environment → General. At minimum:

APP_URL=https://your-app.laravel.cloud
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_KEY=base64:...

LARADOCS_ENABLED=true
LARADOCS_ROUTE_PREFIX=docs

Generate APP_KEY locally with php artisan key:generate --show and paste it in.

See Configuration for the full list of Laradocs options.

#4. Attach a database

In your environment, go to Infrastructure → Add database. Select MySQL or PostgreSQL, choose an instance size, and name your database.

Once attached, Cloud automatically injects the connection credentials into your environment — DB_HOST, DB_DATABASE, DB_USERNAME, and DB_PASSWORD are set for you with no manual configuration required.

#5. Configure build and deploy commands

Cloud runs two distinct command stages per deployment.

Build commands execute during the image build — dependency installation, asset compilation, and config caching:

composer install --no-dev --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader
npm ci && npm run build
php artisan optimize

Deploy commands run on live infrastructure before traffic switches over. Use this for migrations only:

php artisan migrate --force

#6. Queue workers

If you're using a Scout search driver or your app dispatches background jobs, you'll need queue workers. Cloud offers three approaches:

#Managed Queues (recommended)

Under Infrastructure → Add queue, Cloud provisions dedicated worker instances that scale from zero automatically. You only pay for the seconds workers are actively running — a queue at rest costs nothing.

Key settings:

Set QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis in your environment variables and Cloud injects the Redis connection details automatically when you also attach a cache.

#App cluster background process

For low-volume workloads, add a background process directly to your app cluster:

php artisan queue:work --sleep=3 --tries=3 --timeout=90

This is simpler but shares resources with web traffic — fine for staging, less ideal for production under load.

#7. Deploy

Click Deploy on your environment overview. Cloud builds a Docker image, runs your build commands, executes deploy commands against your live infrastructure, then brings the new version online with zero downtime.

Push to Deploy is on by default — subsequent pushes to your configured branch trigger deployments automatically. Disable it under Settings → Deployments and use a deploy hook for CI-driven workflows:

# .github/workflows/deploy.yml
- name: Deploy to Cloud
  run: curl -X POST "${{ secrets.CLOUD_DEPLOY_HOOK }}"

#8. Custom domains

After your first successful deployment, your app gets a free *.laravel.cloud subdomain. To use a custom domain:

1. Go to Environment → Domains and add your domain.
2. Add the DNS record shown (CNAME or TXT for verification).
3. Cloud provisions and renews the SSL certificate automatically.

Your APP_URL environment variable should be updated to match the custom domain after it's verified.