Laravel Azure Deployment Utilities (marchie/lad-utils)

TL; DR

Artisan commands to aid deployment of Laravel applications in Microsoft Azure.

Backstory

Deploying Laravel applications into Azure is a little bit of a dark art.

There are guides out there on how to do it, but for me, the end result wasn't quite what I'd hoped for.

What do I mean by that? Well, I'm deploying my applications using SyntaxC4's Composer Extension, which is great. However, the standard Laravel optimization command is problematic:-

php artisan optimize runs like a dog. I'm talking about half an hour to complete on a dual-core Azure instance, or never (read: over 24 hours before I killed it) finishing on a single-core instance, compared with a couple of seconds on my modest development box. Worse still, the major time-consuming thing that the php artisan optimize command does is to run composer dump-autoload -o, which has already been done by the Composer Extension on Azure.

(NB: The reason seems to be something to do with the number of processes that end up running through the post install command. Composer is a PHP application, which calls the post install commands on the command line. The php artisan optimize post install command kicks off another PHP process, which then calls composer dump-autoload -o on the command line. This starts up yet another PHP process and everything just seems to grind to a halt.)

What this package does

This package gives you an additional Artisan command, which you can call as post install commands in your composer.json:-

azure:optimize-classes extends the standard Artisan optimize command, except it doesn't call composer dump-autoload -o. Note that if you have your application in debug mode, the classes will not be compiled.

(NB: The composer dump-autoload -o command is already called by the Azure Composer Extension)

(Credit to @22media on Laracasts for the legwork on this)

Usage

You need to add the package to your composer.json file:

{
    ...
    "require": {
        ...
        "marchie/lad-utils": "dev-master",
        ...
    },
    ...
}

Then, run composer update to pull in the package.

After the package has been pulled in, add the package's service provider into your Laravel application's config/app.php file:

return [
    ...
    'providers' => [
        ...
        Marchie\LaravelAzureDeploymentUtilities\ServiceProvider::class,
        ...
    ]
    ...
]

With that done, you can use the commands in your composer.json post-install-cmd:

{
    ...
    "scripts": {
        ...
        "post-install-cmd": [
            "php -r \"copy('%HOME\\site\\.env', '.env');\"",
            ...
            "php artisan azure:optimize-classes",
            ...
            "php -r \"unlink('.env');\""
        ],
        ...
    },
    ...
}

Note that we are copying the .env file into the repository first (Laravel needs this file). Then, we run the other post-install commands. Finally, we delete the copied .env file from the repository.