12. Servers and Deployment

PHP applications can be deployed and run on production web servers in a number of ways.

12.1 Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS provides the system and network architecture necessary to run PHP applications on the web. This means little to no configuration for launching PHP applications or PHP frameworks.

Recently PaaS has become a popular method for deploying, hosting, and scaling PHP applications of all sizes. You can find a list of PHP PaaS “Platform as a Service” providers in our resources section.

12.2 Building and Deploying your Application

If you find yourself doing manual database schema changes or running your tests manually before updating your files (manually), think twice! With every additional manual task needed to deploy a new version of your app, the chances for potentially fatal mistakes increase. Whether you’re dealing with a simple update, a comprehensive build process or even a continuous integration strategy, build automation is your friend.

Among the tasks you might want to automate are:

  • Dependency management
  • Compilation, minification of your assets
  • Running tests
  • Creation of documentation
  • Packaging
  • Deployment

Deployment Tools

Deployment tools can be described as a collection of scripts that handle common tasks of software deployment. The deployment tool is not a part of your software, it acts on your software from ‘outside’.

There are many open source tools available to help you with build automation and deployment, some are written in PHP others aren’t. This shouldn’t hold you back from using them, if they’re better suited for the specific job. Here are a few examples:

Phing can control your packaging, deployment or testing process from within a XML build file. Phing (which is based on Apache Ant) provides a rich set of tasks usually needed to install or update a web application and can be extended with additional custom tasks, written in PHP. It’s a solid and robust tool and has been around for a long time, however the tool could be perceived as a bit old fashioned because of the way it deals with configuration (XML files).

Capistrano is a system for intermediate-to-advanced programmers to execute commands in a structured, repeatable way on one or more remote machines. It is pre-configured for deploying Ruby on Rails applications, however you can successfully deploy PHP systems with it. Successful use of Capistrano depends on a working knowledge of Ruby and Rake.

Ansistrano is a couple of Ansible roles to easily manage the deployment process (deploy and rollback) for scripting applications such as PHP, Python and Ruby. It’s an Ansible port for Capistrano. It’s been used by quite a lot of PHP companies already.

Deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP. It’s simple and functional. Features include running tasks in parallel, atomic deployment and keeping consistency between servers. Recipes of common tasks for Symfony, Laravel, Zend Framework and Yii are available. Younes Rafie’s article Easy Deployment of PHP Applications with Deployer is a great tutorial for deploying your application with the tool.

Magallanes is another tool written in PHP with simple configuration done in YAML files. It has support for multiple servers and environments, atomic deployment, and has some built in tasks that you can leverage for common tools and frameworks.

Further reading:

Server Provisioning

Managing and configuring servers can be a daunting task when faced with many servers. There are tools for dealing with this so you can automate your infrastructure to make sure you have the right servers and that they’re configured properly. They often integrate with the larger cloud hosting providers (Amazon Web Services, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc) for managing instances, which makes scaling an application a lot easier.

Ansible is a tool that manages your infrastructure through YAML files. It’s simple to get started with and can manage complex and large scale applications. There is an API for managing cloud instances and it can manage them through a dynamic inventory using certain tools.

Puppet is a tool that has its own language and file types for managing servers and configurations. It can be used in a master/client setup or it can be used in a “master-less” mode. In the master/client mode the clients will poll the central master(s) for new configuration on set intervals and update themselves if necessary. In the master-less mode you can push changes to your nodes.

Chef is a powerful Ruby based system integration framework that you can build your whole server environment or virtual boxes with. It integrates well with Amazon Web Services through their service called OpsWorks.

Further reading:

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily — leading to multiple integrations per day. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.

– Martin Fowler

There are different ways to implement continuous integration for PHP. Travis CI has done a great job of making continuous integration a reality even for small projects. Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service. It can be integrated with GitHub and offers support for many languages including PHP. GitHub has continuous integration workflows with GitHub Actions.

Further reading:

12.3 Docker

Docker - a lightweight alternative to a full virtual machine - is so called because it’s all about “containers”. A container is a building block which, in the simplest case, does one specific job, e.g. running a web server. An “image” is the package you use to build the container - Docker has a repository full of them.

A typical LAMP application might have three containers: a web server, a PHP-FPM process and MySQL. As with shared folders in Vagrant, you can leave your application files where they are and tell Docker where to find them.

You can generate containers from the command line (see example below) or, for ease of maintenance, build a docker-compose.yml file for your project specifying which to create and how they communicate with one another.

Docker may help if you’re developing multiple websites and want the separation that comes from installing each on its own virtual machine, but don’t have the necessary disk space or the time to keep everything up to date. It’s efficient: the installation and downloads are quicker, you only need to store one copy of each image however often it’s used, containers need less RAM and share the same OS kernel, so you can have more servers running simultaneously, and it takes a matter of seconds to stop and start them, no need to wait for a full server boot.

Example: Running your PHP Applications in Docker

After installing docker on your machine, you can start a web server with one command. The following will download a fully functional Apache installation with the latest PHP version, map /path/to/your/php/files to the document root, which you can view at http://localhost:8080:

1 docker run -d --name my-php-webserver -p 8080:80 -v /path/to/your/php/files:/var/www/html/ php\
2 :apache

This will initialize and launch your container. -d makes it run in the background. To stop and start it, simply run docker stop my-php-webserver and docker start my-php-webserver (the other parameters are not needed again).

Learn more about Docker

The command above shows a quick way to run a basic server. There’s much more you can do (and thousands of pre-built images in the Docker Hub). Take time to learn the terminology and read the Docker User Guide to get the most from it, and don’t run random code you’ve downloaded without checking it’s safe – unofficial images may not have the latest security patches. If in doubt, stick to the official repositiories.

The PHPDocker.io site will auto-generate all the files you need for a fully-featured LAMP/LEMP stack, including your choice of PHP version and extensions.

12.4 Vagrant

Vagrant helps you build your virtual boxes on top of the known virtual environments and will configure these environments based on a single configuration file. These boxes can be set up manually, or you can use “provisioning” software such as Puppet or Chef to do this for you. Provisioning the base box is a great way to ensure that multiple boxes are set up in an identical fashion and removes the need for you to maintain complicated “set up” command lists. You can also “destroy” your base box and recreate it without many manual steps, making it easy to create a “fresh” installation.

Vagrant creates folders for sharing your code between your host and your virtual machine, which means that you can create and edit your files on your host machine and then run the code inside your virtual machine.

Up next

13. Virtualization