In this post to his site Freek Van der Herten shares an Envoy script that can be used to deploy an application to a remote server with (or without I suppose) one key thing: downtime.

Envoy is Laravel’s official task runner. Using a Blade style syntax tasks can be defined that can be run both locally and remotely. At Spatie, we’ve been using Envoy for quite some time to deploy code on production servers. [...] [Our trusty Envoy scriot] had a big downside: the application would be down for close to a minute. This week I took the time to solve that issue.

He talks about the changes he made to their deployment process towards using a symlink-based system as suggested by this guide. The result is an updated script that follows the same flow. He steps through the changes he made to the script and tweaks used to get the best performance out of the deploy process.

The Servers for Hackers site has a new post walking you through the steps to deploy a PHP application with Envoy, the Laravel-based ssh task runner to make automated deployment simpler.

We'll use Laravel's Envoy to deploy a PHP application to a production server. This will make a new release directory, clone the repository into it, run any needed build steps, and then finally swap the new code out with the older code, so that Nginx and PHP-FPM serve the new code.

They walk you through the full setup you'll need to get the deployment working including generating ssh keys, installing Envoy globally and making the first Envoy configuration file. With that in place and working, he enhances it with quite a few more steps including checking out a new version of the repository to a "release" directory, executing Composer to pull in needed libraries and changing the symlink to point the document root and the freshly installed version. He also includes the configuration for the Nginx server to set up a Laravel-based application inside of a Vagrant VM instance.