Laravel and DevOps: A Guide to Continuous Integration and Deployment

Introduction to Continuous Integration and Deployment

Last quarter, our team discovered that our Laravel application was becoming increasingly complex, and manual deployment was taking a toll on our productivity. We realized that implementing Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) was crucial to streamline our workflow. Here's what I learned when we decided to dive into the world of DevOps with Laravel.

Why CI/CD Matters

I was frustrated when I realized that our team was spending more time on deployment than on actual development. This surprised me, as I had always thought that deployment was a straightforward process. However, after delving deeper, I discovered that automating our testing, building, and deployment processes could significantly reduce errors and increase efficiency.

Setting Up Our CI/CD Pipeline

We chose to use GitHub Actions for our CI/CD pipeline due to its seamless integration with GitHub and the extensive community support. The process involved creating a .yml file in our repository's .github/workflows directory, specifying the steps for our pipeline, including testing, building, and deployment.

name: Laravel CI/CD

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Setup PHP
        uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
        with:
          php-version: '8.