Free guides · no paywall

Guides for people who ship Laravel

By · Updated

Practical, opinionated and free: everything we know about deploying Laravel and WordPress on Ubuntu, hardening PHP apps, CI/CD, the wider Laravel ecosystem, AI-assisted development and building a developer stack you actually own. Written by the author of Cipi, the open-source Laravel deploy CLI.

Ubuntu · deployment

Deploy Laravel on an Ubuntu VPS

The full production stack explained, every manual step, the one-command alternative, and the operational habits that keep servers healthy.

Read the guide → cybersecurity · PHP & Laravel

The Laravel security checklist

Server hardening, application settings, dependency scanning, secrets and incident response — the boring, high-impact work first.

Read the guide → Laravel · field guide

The Laravel ecosystem in 2026

Octane, Horizon, Reverb, Livewire, Inertia, Filament, Pest — what each piece does and when it is actually worth adopting.

Read the guide → CI/CD · Git

CI/CD & Git workflow for Laravel

A Git workflow that scales down to one developer, a copy-paste GitHub Actions pipeline, and zero-downtime deployment patterns.

Read the guide → AI · specs · MCP

Spec-driven development with AI agents

Specs over vibes, MCP as the tool standard, guardrails that keep agent code safe, and a concrete spec-to-production loop.

Read the guide → stacks · utilities

The self-hosted developer stack

Deploys, error tracking, analytics, storage, newsletters and security scanning — a stack you own for the price of a VPS.

Read the guide → backups · S3 · VPS

Back up a VPS to an S3 bucket

Off-site Laravel backups with Cipi: configure any S3-compatible bucket, schedule cron, prune old snapshots, and restore onto a clean VPS.

Read the guide → WordPress · custom apps · GitHub

Deploy WordPress on Cipi

Create a custom app, MariaDB and SSL, keep uploads and wp-config safe, then auto-deploy from GitHub Actions on every push to main.

Read the guide → Laravel · MCP · debug

Use cipi/agent and the project MCP

Install the Laravel companion, connect Cursor to the in-app MCP, then debug, run named seeders and query the database without SSH.

Read the guide → GUI · API · MCP

Control panel and API

What the two optional extensions unlock: REST, MCP, Swagger, a multi-server dashboard, server cockpit and automation — without leaving the CLI.

Read the guide → cipi.yml · config as code

Manage apps with cipi.yml

Aliases, PHP, workers, Reverb, scheduler, healthcheck and backups in one committed file — generate, plan, apply, or reconcile after every deploy.

Read the guide →

Every guide is hands-on and vendor-honest: where a SaaS is the better choice, we say so. Where a free, self-hosted tool covers the job, we show the exact commands — usually starting with wget -O - https://cipi.sh/setup.sh | bash. Evaluating deployment tools instead? Start with the best Laravel Forge alternatives in 2026 or the full comparison hub.