Laravel CI/CD Pipelines — Artisan Commands Run Themselves Now

Laravel's deployment checklist is long: run migrations, cache config and routes, compile assets with Vite, restart queue workers, clear old caches, and seed any new data. The official documentation lists over a dozen steps for a production deployment. Missing any one of them can cause cryptic errors that are hard to debug.

Queue workers and scheduled tasks add operational complexity. Horizon or standalone queue workers need to be restarted after deployment to pick up new code. Scheduled tasks (php artisan schedule:run) need a cron entry or a dedicated scheduler container. If your deployment does not handle these, you end up with workers running old code and missed scheduled jobs.

Laravel Mix or Vite asset compilation needs Node.js in your build environment, adding a second language runtime to your Docker build. The compiled assets must be available in the final image, but Node.js itself should not be. This requires careful multi-stage Docker configuration.

We build a multi-stage Docker image: a Node.js stage compiles assets with Vite, a Composer stage installs PHP dependencies, and the final stage combines them on php:8.3-fpm-alpine. The result is a production image under 150 MB with precompiled assets and optimized autoloader, but no Node.js or dev dependencies.

Testing runs Laravel's built-in PHPUnit or Pest integration with a real MySQL or PostgreSQL database. We configure RefreshDatabase or LazilyRefreshDatabase traits and run tests in parallel with Pest's --parallel flag. Laravel Dusk browser tests run in a headless Chrome container for full end-to-end coverage.

The deployment pipeline executes the full Laravel deployment sequence automatically: php artisan migrate --force, config:cache, route:cache, view:cache, event:cache. Queue workers are deployed as separate containers with php artisan horizon or queue:work as entrypoints. A dedicated scheduler container runs php artisan schedule:work for cron tasks. Health checks validate the app, database, cache, and queue connections.

A Laravel-specific CI/CD pipeline:

• Full deployment sequence — migrations, cache warming, and asset compilation automated
• Multi-stage Docker build — Node.js for Vite, Composer for PHP, slim final image
• Test automation — PHPUnit/Pest with real database and optional Dusk browser tests
• Queue worker management — Horizon or queue:work as separate containers with restart on deploy
• Scheduled tasks — scheduler container running schedule:work
• Environment management — .env variables injected per environment, never committed
• Rollback support — automatic rollback on failed health checks or migration errors