On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted that aims to help you deploy your PHP application with Rocketeer, a PHP-based deployment tool with lots of built in functionality for more complex deployments.

There used to be a time when PHP developers had to use deployment tools that were aimed at general web applications. [...] But nowadays, we're blessed with a few deployment tools written in our language that enable deeper integration. One of these tools is Rocketeer, a tool that takes inspiration from Capistrano and the Laravel framework.

Rocketeer is a modern tool that brings a great approach for your deployment needs. That is to run tasks and manage your application across different environments and servers.

They start with a brief introduction to the Rocketeer tool (basically a SSH driven command execution engine) and show you how to get it installed on your system. They then help you initialize the setup directory (.rocketeer) and describe each of the pieces and how the deployment happens. They show you how to configure events and tasks in the system to perform during execution. They also show the definition of "strategies" to execution events/tasks in groups, work with plugins and, finally, running an example deployment.

The Semaphore CI blog has a new tutorial showing you how to use Rocketeer and Docker to deploy PHP applications, pushing the resulting application out into a Docker container.

Deploying web applications is an integral part of modern web development. From this need, many tools have emerged to make the process as easy as possible. Rocketeer is heavily influenced by Capistrano and Laravel's principle of elegant code. It strives to make the deployment process accessible for everyone. [...] We'll deploy a fresh Laravel installation to a running Docker instance. This enables us to focus on setting up and using Rocketeer while the Docker instance will act as an application server requiring zero configuration and a great environment to experiment with.

They start with a list of requirements you'll need before getting started including Docker running on the server and Composer. They help you get Rocketeer installed and using the Docker command line too to set up and configure the server. Next up they show you how to use the "rocketeer" command to configure the Laravel application to be deployed. Once configured, they show you what updates you'll need to make and, finally, how to run the deployment. They also "dig deeper" and look at the file system setup on the server, stages of deployment, tasks, strategies and plugins.