Setting up CircleCI Continuous Integration with Laravel – Then deploy Forge or Fortrabbit

Including Continuous Integration is great, but there are many providers to choose from. CircleCI has a pretty decent free plan, but using it for your Laravel app might be a bit confusing.

Instructions for deploying Laravel 5.5 with Circle CI:

This site has a nice boilerplate script:

https://medium.com/@wesmahler/circleci-2-0-configuration-for-laravel-5-5-with-laravel-dusk-ab1cc9b9d4a7

But if you found a better script, let us know in the comments.

Make sure you have specified the testing environment variables in your .env.testing and phpunit.xml if you are using PHPUnit.

Getting a Mysql Root error?

Since March 2021, we sometimes got this error:

[ERROR] [Entrypoint]: MYSQL_USER="root", MYSQL_PASSWORD cannot be used for the root user
    Use one of the following to control the root user password:
    - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD
    - MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD
    - MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD

We solved it by changing the MYSQL_USER to another name than ‘root’.

Deploying on Laravel Forge via CI

After that call this forge-deploy.sh script in your final step in config.yml:

  - run:
     name: Run deploy script
     command: sudo chmod +x ./deploy.sh; sudo ./deploy.sh

Then create a deploy.sh script in your app and include the Laravel Forge / Envoyer deployment trigger URL (can be found in your app’s dashboard in Laravel Forge / Envoyer):

#!/bin/bash
# Trigger deployment
# Replace the url below with your envoyer/forge url
# APPLICATION1
curl -s 'https://forge.laravel.com/servers/123456...';

# APPLICATION2 - if you have multiple applications that needs to be deployed and triggered
curl -s 'https://forge.laravel.com/servers/12345678...';

echo 'Deployment triggered!'

After this, you can push to Github or Bitbucket and see if the build succeeds and deploys to Laravel Forge / Envoyer. Make sure you disable auto-deploy, as you only would like to deploy to Laravel Forge / Envoyer after a successful CI build.

Deploy on Fortrabbit with CircleCI

Rather want to deploy on Fortrabbit instead of Laravel Forge after a successful CircleCI build?

Read more about using CI with Fortrabbit here.

To setup the deployment to Fortrabbit from CircleCI follow this procedure:

1. Run this script on a terminal client: ssh-keygen -m PEM -t rsa -C “[email protected]”
2. Copy the private key to CircleCI
3. Go to the project -> SSH Keys -> Additional SSH Keys Enter hostname: deploy.XYZ.frbit.com (replace XYX with your Fortrabbit server location)
4. Add the public key in the Fortrabbit Dashboard’s public SSH key manager
5. Add the fingerprint that you see in the CircleCI dashboard to the config.yml file:
6. NOTE: adding a SSH key to a third party service always carries out risks, be aware of them and if it’s too risky, don’t take these steps.

version: 2
jobs:
  deploy-job:
    steps:
      - add_ssh_keys:
          fingerprints:
            - "SO:ME:FIN:G:ER:PR:IN:T"

Try to push the updated files to Github or Bitbucket.

See whether this build succeeds. If not, fix the issues until it works.

Add this code to the circleci/config.yml script after the testing steps:

      - run:
         name: Add FRBIT remote
         command: git remote add frbit YOURFRBITGITURL

      - run:
         name: Add FRBIT remote fingerprint to known hosts
         command: ssh-keyscan deploy.XYZ.frbit.com >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

      - run:
         name: Deploy to FRBIT
         command: git push frbit

Don’t forget to replace the variables YOURFRBITGITURL and XYZ.

Using these scripts and instructions is on your own risk of course.

Got any suggestions for a better workflow? Let us know!