DevOps · hard

45. Deployment Strategies

Getting Laravel into production reliably.

Common deployment approaches include zero-downtime tools like Laravel Forge, Envoyer, or custom CI/CD pipelines that build releases in a new directory and atomically symlink them live. Migrations should run with --force in production (since artisan prompts for confirmation otherwise), and maintenance mode (php artisan down --secret=...) can gate access during risky deploys. Environment-specific configuration lives in .env, never committed to version control.

Check your understanding

1. Why must migrations run with --force in production?
It's required syntax alwaysArtisan otherwise prompts for confirmation, which breaks non-interactive CI/CDIt skips validationIt disables rollbacks
2. What does 'php artisan down --secret=xyz' enable?
Permanently disables the appMaintenance mode with a bypass URL using the secretDeletes the databaseClears all caches