Inside the Briefcase

Augmented Reality Analytics: Transforming Data Visualization

Augmented Reality Analytics: Transforming Data Visualization

Tweet Augmented reality is transforming how data is visualized...

ITBriefcase.net Membership!

ITBriefcase.net Membership!

Tweet Register as an ITBriefcase.net member to unlock exclusive...

Women in Tech Boston

Women in Tech Boston

Hear from an industry analyst and a Fortinet customer...

IT Briefcase Interview: Simplicity, Security, and Scale – The Future for MSPs

IT Briefcase Interview: Simplicity, Security, and Scale – The Future for MSPs

In this interview, JumpCloud’s Antoine Jebara, co-founder and GM...

Tips And Tricks On Getting The Most Out of VPN Services

Tips And Tricks On Getting The Most Out of VPN Services

In the wake of restrictions in access to certain...

How to Deploy Laravel?

April 23, 2018 No Comments

Featured article by Vladislav Pshenychka, Tech Author and SEO Specialist

While developing an application, a programmer wants it to be perfect. That is why the process of deployment is highly essential for a real professional. However, the variety of approaches and techniques, which are used for that whole process, might become a huge confusion for a junior developer. That is why, we decided to make the deployment part clear. Let’s try to focus on all the aspects of this process of the Laravel application, what might be a great aid for those programmers, who are going to use this framework for a lot for the projects.

And, as usual, let’s start with the basics.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is one of the most popular and widely used frameworks for the applications development. This tool was developed only in 2011, so, for some users it could seem old, for others, who love Perl, – definitely new. However, thanks to a high quality of work, which is done by the developers, for now, Laravel becomes one of the simplest way to build the app.

To be honest, the main purpose of using Laravel is to avoid the problems with coding. Maybe “the problems” are too general saing. It would be more correct to mention that using this framework, you can simply get along with pattern projecting work, safety issues, and codebase interactions. It allows you to make the process of your product development really efficient and modern.

Thanks to Laravel popularity, the PHP community is growing expeditionary from a year to a year, while making the innovations of developers more interesting and frequent, what is a great benefit. It also worths mentioning that all needful documentation for working are clearly sorted out. Finally, you need to follow the standards and try to make the entire inside application or website structure as simple and readable as possible.

Are you ready to proceed?

What is Deployment?

Deploy involves a few processes like installing, configuring, running, testing, and implementing all required changes. As a result, after deployment, you will get up and run the new software or hardware properly. It also means that each change that is going to be added passes this process before the release.

The main point of the deployment is providing quick feedback to the developers and minimize the waste in a whole way. Thanks to dividing the deploy into several stages, each change can go thoroughly through each step and other changes could be done in parallel. It helps in the cases when something’s gonna fail and you could stop just the problematic issues, not the whole process.

The other thing you should know about the deploy process is that you can manage the priority of the features that could take longer time could take a little. And as a result of the one side, you will have several quick features, and from the other side, you will have the heavy feature and all of them won’t break the flow.

It’s also highly important to show the pipeline map of all steps to your clients. Even non-technical people can understand why the process of implementing the features can take the exact amount of the time. Such consideration helps you to require all needful tools or resources.

Which technology to use for deployment?

One of the most popular and widely used approaches, which exists in the field of programming is so-called continuous integration-continuous deployment or CI-CD. That is actually a technique, which is based on an idea of a daily code uploading to a shared repository. It allows to make the process of development much faster and easier.

There are several tools, which could be used for CI. For example, GitLab and Travis CI, which are used by skilled developers from successful companies all over the world.

Gitlab – is a service which has a single UI with continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Just clicking the button, you can deploy your app in manual way. You can choose whether you want to deploy to staging or production or make a rollback.

Travis CI – is a service which helps you to divide the continuous integration and continuous deployment to different parts. Using it, you can deploy the newest changes from Github.

You can choose the approachable way for deployment and you will have the certain pros. First of all, it is a simplification of the developmental process. Well, here you can reduce the number of process steps. The second benefit is automation. Each part of the flow is made automatic wherever possible, eliminating wait states. And, finally, stabilization is also a really valuable point. And, all of these actions are usually combined with the usage of data storages, which exist separately for GitLab and Travis. The conclusion is that with the involvement of the deployment strategy and the CI technology itself, you may be able to avoid a huge amount of really widespread problems and issues of any project-building period. However, there is an open question – how to hold that deployment process and set up all the needed elements of it.

How to Deploy? Step-by-step Instruction

The process of deployment might not be the easiest task for a beginning developer. Just try to understand that the programmer should take into accommodation all functionality, logic and architecture of the application and make a proper result in the end. Sounds challenging? We’ll try to help with dealing all the steps of deployment, involving needful tools, CI technique, Travis, and GitLab repositories.

After the testing period and thorough analysis of the application, the CI is deploying the application which should be connected to the server, launched the migration and setted up different additional functions, while finishing the process.

What is the process if you would choose Travis?

1. You have to link it to GitHub, because it is actually the foundation for your app deployment.

2. Taking traditional toolkit within Travis, you have to set it up in a way you actually need.

3. After these steps, you have to work directly with the project folders. You have to add all the folders, such as .travis.yml and .travis.env to the folder itself and put all of the variables according to your project.

4. Then, do not forget to generate the key, what will make accessible the server.

5. Later, you will be needed to create two other keys for a third-party access.

6. Furthermore, to the created folder, you may need to add other technical documentation.

7. Do not forget about the integration of variables.

8. On the final steps of the deployment setting up, you have to generate another ssh key for an existing server. Then, the process of your project secularisation might require several other steps to be finished.

In case if you prefer GitLab, follow these steps:

– make a merge request with a code;
– deploy it to the staging;
– check the changes;
– approve, if it’s ok;
– merge to master and deploy;
– make a rollback if something’s going wrong.

Well, that is actually the end of the process of deployment. After doing all of the needed configurations, it supposed to be held properly and without any serious bugs.

Conclusion

Despite that the process of Laravel app deployment may look a bit complicated for the newcomers, that’s just your first impression. If you will make all the same operations for several times, it would not seem such complicated anymore. Furthermore, the entire technique of app deployment and the use of repositories is highly beneficial, what makes it worth all the efforts.

Just remember all advantages which you will have with the deployment: smaller changes in the code can be done simply, error segregation is also quicker,  you could have more accurate testability process and the opportunity to detect and fix the bugs which escape on a production. It really matters when you can have a prompt turn-around of new features implementation so your general velocity of a product is becoming higher.

About the Author

The author of this article is Vlad Pshenychka, a freelance blogger working now for Artjoker, a software development company that specializes in startups launch including mobile and web development. Our goal is to turn clients’ ideas only to excellent results!

Leave a Reply

(required)

(required)


ADVERTISEMENT

Gartner

WomeninTech