The Scotch.io site has a new post that wants to help make your Laravel deployments on Forge a simple thing. Forge is a "frontend" to make deployment on the hosting platform of your choice simpler with features for configuring the server, application deployment and automation (like push to deploy).

Forge is an incredible tool in the family of Laravel products that helps developers focus on developing, not deploying and hosting. I personally use it when deploying Laravel applications and it does make life much easier. Many of the pain points of hosting are taken care of for you so you can get right back to developing. [...] We’ll be diving into how we can deploy a Laravel application to Forge using Digital Ocean and GitHub.

He starts with a brief introduction to how Forge works and cooperates with the Digital Ocean stack to create the server and deploy the application. He answers a few questions about "why should you use Forge" and then gets into the actual setup of the server. He walks you through:

• Linking the project to a GitHub or BitBucket repository
• Adding SSH keys to connect to use for connecting to the server
• Creating a server

He also goes through some of the server management features Forge offers in its dashboard including monitoring services, server tools and basic site management controls. Once everything is set up, he shows how to deploy from the GitHub repository and how to use third-party integrations (like Slack or HipChat) and the use of environment variables.