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Introduction

Laravel Cloud applications can be made up of many environments, such as “production”, “staging”, or even short-lived environments used for trialing new features you’re developing for your application. Compute infrastructure, resources, and deployment settings are unique to each environment, allowing you to fine-tune each environment based on its purpose. For example, you might wish to assign small, hibernating compute instances to your staging environment, while larger, non-hibernating compute instances are assigned to your production environment.

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Build and deploy commands

You may define how both the frontend and backend of your application are built during deployment from the “Deployments” section of your environment settings.

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Build commands

Build commands allow you to customize the build process for your application. Typically, this will involve customizing how you want Composer and NPM dependencies to be installed. In addition, you may add any custom build scripts or commands that are specific to your Laravel application.
Running php artisan optimize or php artisan config:cache should be done during the build process, not during the deploy process.

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Private Composer packages

To allow the installation of private Composer packages, you will need to configure your application’s Composer HTTP authentication credentials for each package using the composer config command. You should add this command to your build commands prior to invoking composer install: 
composer config http-basic.composer.fluxui.dev your-username your-license-key

composer install --no-dev
Build commands must complete within 15 minutes or they will timeout.

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Dynamic environment variables

# Adding a dynamic environment variable
echo "MY_DYNAMIC_VAR=value" >> .env

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Deploy commands

Your environment’s “Deploy Commands” are run on your Laravel Cloud infrastructure just before a new deployment goes “live”. Typically, these commands will be used to migrate your environment’s database. Unlike build commands, changes made to the filesystem by deploy commands will not be persisted to your application.
Deploy commands must complete within 15 minutes or they will timeout.

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Unnecessary build and deploy commands

The following commands are either automatically handled by Laravel Cloud or should not be run during deployment:
  • php artisan queue:restart - Queue workers are automatically restarted after each deployment
  • php artisan horizon:terminate - Horizon processes are automatically managed during deployments
  • php artisan optimize:clear - This clears the cache and can cause unexpected behavior, especially related to the queue
  • php artisan storage:link - The symbolic link won’t persist as changes made during deploy commands are not saved. Use Laravel Object Storage for persistent file storage instead.
Typically, your deploy commands should only include database migrations and other essential post-deployment tasks.

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Environment settings

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Environment variables

Within your environment’s settings, the environment variables section allows you to customize the .env variables available to your environment.
In addition to injecting your custom environment variables, Laravel Cloud will automatically inject a variety of environment variables into your environment on your behalf, including any credentials necessary to connect to Laravel Cloud resources like databases, key-value storage, or object storage.
Custom environment variables take priority and will override any automatically injected environment variables.
After changing an environment’s variables, a re-deployment is required in order for the changes to take effect.

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PHP version

Laravel Cloud supports PHP 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5. PHP 8.4 remains the default selection for new environments. You may select the PHP version that should be used by an environment on the environment’s General Settings page. After changing the PHP version, a re-deployment is required in order for the changes to take effect.
PHP 8.5 is generally available, but the pdo_sqlsrv extension is temporarily unavailable until the upstream project adds 8.5 support. Use PHP 8.2, 8.3, or 8.4 if you need those extensions today.

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PHP extensions

Laravel Cloud currently supports the following PHP extensions: 
apcu, bcmath, calendar, Core, ctype, curl, date, dom, ev, excimer, exif,
fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, grpc, hash, iconv, igbinary, imagick,
imap, intl, json, ldap, libxml, mbstring, mongodb, msgpack, mysqli,
mysqlnd, openssl, pcntl, pcre, PDO, pdo_mysql, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pdo_sqlsrv,
Phar, posix, pspell, random, readline, redis, Reflection, session, shmop,
SimpleXML, soap, sockets, sodium, SPL, sqlite3, sqlsrv, standard, tokenizer, xml,
xmlreader, xmlwriter, xsl, Zend OPcache, zip, zlib.
You can also list the currently loaded extensions by running php -m using Laravel Cloud’s “Command” feature in your environment dashboard.

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PHP memory limit

Laravel Cloud allocates PHP memory dynamically based on a percentage of your instance’s total memory. If your application requires a specific amount, you can override this by defining a new memory_limit. You can override the default memory limit by adding configuration directly in your application code. The most common method is to update your public/index.php and your artisan file: 
<?php

// Set memory limit to 512 MB...
ini_set('memory_limit', '512M');

// Or, remove memory limits entirely...
ini_set('memory_limit', -1);
Or, you can set the memory limit via build commands to avoid modifying your project’s source code: 
# Add memory_limit to the top of the public/index.php file...
sed -i 's/<?php/<?php\nini_set('\''memory_limit'\'', '\''512M'\'');/g' public/index.php

# Add memory_limit to the top of the artisan file...
sed -i 's/<?php/<?php\nini_set('\''memory_limit'\'', '\''512M'\'');/g' artisan
Memory adjustments should be made early in your application’s lifecycle to ensure optimal performance. Excessive memory usage can negatively impact overall application efficiency. While setting the memory limit to -1 removes all memory restrictions, this option should be used with caution, especially in production environments, as it can lead to unpredictable behavior. For more information regarding PHP memory configuration, consult the official PHP documentation.

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Node version

From your environment’s General Settings page, you may select the Node version that should be available to the build commands used to build your application during a deployment. Node 24 is the default for new environments, and you can switch between Node 20, Node 22, and Node 24 at any time. After changing the Node version, a re-deployment is required in order for the changes to take effect.

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Cloud domains

Each Laravel Cloud environment is assigned a free laravel.cloud domain the first time it is deployed successfully. This makes it easy to test and build your application before attaching a custom domain. Laravel Cloud domains are constructed using a combination of your application and environment name. If either of these names are changed, the Laravel Cloud domain will be updated to reflect the changes. A redeployment is required for this change to take effect.

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Custom domains

Of course, before shipping your application to the world, you will likely want to assign your own custom domain name to your production environment. Laravel Cloud will guide you through DNS configuration, verify domain ownership, and issue an SSL certificate automatically. For comprehensive documentation (DNS records, verification paths, wildcards, provider-specific guides, and plan limits), see Domains.
If your domain verification is taking longer than expected, check out our docs on verifying domains.

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Stop and restart

To stop an environment, click the ”…” button next to the environment’s “Deploy” button. Then, click “Stop”. When you stop an environment, all App and Worker clusters within the environment will be shutdown. This means all web traffic, background processes, and scheduled tasks will stop processing. You will not be charged for the environment’s compute, but you will still be charged for any attached resources. You can restart the environment using the same dropdown menu. A full deployment is required to restart an environment.

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Replicate

It is common for environments in the same application to have similar or identical resource and settings configurations. Therefore, when creating new environments, it is often more convenient to clone an existing environment and make changes rather than creating a new environment from scratch. To replicate an environment, click the ”…” button next to the environment’s “Deploy” button. Then, click “Replicate”. Confirm you are replicating the correct environment and Git branch, then enter a name for your new environment. By default, all General, Environment, and Deployment settings will be duplicated. You can optionally edit the default replication settings for compute and resources. The default replication behavior is:
  • Compute: duplicate all clusters (including size, autoscaling, hibernation, scheduler, Octane, Inertia, and background process settings)
  • Database: use the same database compute / storage cluster, but create a new logical database schema
  • Cache: use the same KV Store instance, but add a unique CACHE_PREFIX environment variable to your application
  • Object storage: no replication
Review and edit the “Replication options” as needed before deploying your new environment. The defaults provided are a sensible balance between cost and performance, but may not be right for your application’s specific use case. Use extra care when replicating a production environment to avoid reusing resources in a way that will impact performance or interfere with queued jobs, sessions, or other application data.

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Commands

Laravel Cloud allows you to execute commands directly in your environment. Navigate to your environment’s “Commands” tab to run one-time commands such as php artisan cache:clear.
Commands should be non-interactive and may not run for more than 15 minutes.
Commands will be executed on any available instance in your environment.

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Filesystem

Environment filesystems are ephemeral, meaning files may not persist across requests or jobs. New deployments or re-deployments will reset the filesystem. In addition, each replica of your compute cluster has its own filesystem. Thus, you should treat the filesystem as temporary, unshared disk space that is only consistent during a single request or job. The total disk space available on each replica is proportional to the compute / RAM of the cluster. Every 1GB of RAM is equal to 512MB of disk space. For example, a cluster with 2GB of RAM will have 1GB of ephemeral disk space available to it. If you exceed the available disk space, your application may crash and the deployment may need to restart. We recommend using redis or database drivers for a persistent cache and session via a KV Store or database resource. For persistent file storage, use the s3 driver via Laravel Object Storage.

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Nightwatch integration

Laravel Cloud environments have built-in support for Laravel Nightwatch monitoring. Nightwatch provides deep insights into your application environment’s performance, exceptions, logs, and overall health.
1

Install Nightwatch package

Install the Laravel Nightwatch package in your application locally using Composer:
composer require laravel/nightwatch
Run composer require laravel/nightwatch on your local machine to update your composer.json and composer.lock files before deploying.
2

Connect Nightwatch

Click the Connect Nightwatch button in your environment dashboard.
3

Enable monitoring

Toggle Enable monitoring to activate Nightwatch for your environment.
4

Enter your Nightwatch token

Enter your Nightwatch token, which you can find in your Nightwatch application settings.
Enabling Nightwatch will automatically run the agent across all the App compute and Worker clusters in the environment. You can setup Nightwatch manually if you want the agent to run on specific instances.
When enabled, Laravel Cloud will automatically inject the following environment variables into your environment: 
NIGHTWATCH_TOKEN=
NIGHTWATCH_REQUEST_SAMPLE_RATE=0.1
LOG_CHANNEL=stack
LOG_STACK=laravel-cloud-socket,nightwatch
You can override these variables in your environment variable settings if needed.
If you have previously configured Nightwatch manually with a background process, you must remove that process from every cluster before enabling the built-in integration to avoid issues with your environment.