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Deploying Laravel to fortrabbit (Gitlab CI)

Automatic deploy of Laravel projects to fortrabbit, including built assets and database migrations, using Gitlab CI.

The snippet below assumes a standard Laravel setup. Gitlab CI builds the assets and uses git add --force to add the gitignored output files, commits it to a temporary branch and force pushes to the fortrabbit remote, triggering a deploy.

You will need to populate some environment variables:

  • SSH_PRIVATE_KEY needs to be the content of a private key file, whose public key is authorized to push to fortrabbit.
  • FORTRABBIT_APP is the user name assigned to your fortrabbit app, for example laravel-foobar. This is usually the same as your app name and can be found under SFTP > SFTP User, or as part of the Clone URL.
  • FORTRABBIT_HOST is the host name assigned to your fortrabbit host, for example deploy.eu2.frbit.com. This can be found under SFTP > SFTP Server, or as part of the Clone URL.

Set up those three environment variables, and use this .gitlab-ci.yml, adjusted to your liking:

image: node:latest # use the most recent node docker image

cache: # cache the npm data between different jobs
  key: $CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG # key the cache by the current branch
  paths:
    - .npm/ # only folders in the current project directory can be cached

before_script:
  - npm ci --cache .npm --prefer-offline # make npm use a cache folder in the current project directory instead of home
  - mkdir -p ~/.ssh # create ssh config folder
  - echo "$SSH_PRIVATE_KEY" > ~/.ssh/id_rsa # save the provided private key
  - echo "Host $FORTRABBIT_HOST \n IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa" > ~/.ssh/config # use provided ssh key for connection to fortrabbit
  - chmod 400 ~/.ssh/id_rsa # SSH client will complain if key file has wrong permissions
  - git config --global user.email 'ci@gitlab'
  - git config --global user.name 'GitLab'
  - ssh-keyscan $FORTRABBIT_HOST >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts # fetch the current public key for the fortrabbit server, to prevent interactive confirmation prompt

push_to_fortrabbit:
  script:
    - npm install # install dependencies
    - npm run production # build files 
    - git checkout -b temp # check out new branch
    - git add public/js public/css public/mix-manifest.json --force # force staging of gitignored compiled files
    - git commit -m "Commit built files" # put into new commit
    - git remote add fortrabbit "$FORTRABBIT_APP@$FORTRABBIT_HOST:$FORTRABBIT_APP.git" # add fortrabbit as remote
    - git push fortrabbit temp:master --force # push new files to fortrabbit - this will trigger a composer update
    - ssh "$FORTRABBIT_APP@$FORTRABBIT_HOST" "php artisan migrate --force" # run migrations
  only:
    - master # only run for commits on the master branch