Modern PHP

Chapter 9. Deployment

We’ve got a provisioned server running Nginx and PHP-FPM. Now we need to deploy our PHP application to a production server. There are many ways to push code into production. FTP was a popular way to deploy PHP code back when PHP developers first started banging rocks together. FTP still works, but today there are safer and more predictable deployment strategies. This chapter shows you how to use modern tools to automate deployment in a simple, predictable, and reversible way.

Version Control

I assume you are using version control, right? If you are, good job. If you aren’t, stop what you are doing and version control your code. I prefer to version control my code with Git, but other version control software like Mercurial works, too. I use Git because it’s what I know, and it works seamlessly with popular online repositories like Bitbucket and GitHub.

Version control is an invaluable tool for PHP application developers because it lets us track changes to our codebase. We can tag points in time as a release, we can roll back to a previous state, and we can experiment with new features on separate branches that do not affect our production code. More important, version control helps us automate PHP application deployment.

Automate Deployment

It is important that you automate application deployment so that it becomes a simple, predictable, and reversible process. The last thing you want to worry about is a complicated deployment process. Complicated deployments ...