Introduction

Laravel + modern PHP can scale beautifully—with the right foundations. This post shows how we help teams upgrade safely, speed up delivery, and stabilise performance.

Outcomes We Target

• Faster releases via cached builds and parallel tests
• Reliable deploys (zero-downtime, canary, rollback)
• p95 latency down and error rate steady
• Transparent costs with infra tagging and budgets

Core Workstreams

1) CI/CD for Laravel

• Composer/npm caching; split tests (PHPUnit/Pest)
• Build once; promote artifact across envs
• Preview environments for risky PRs

# .github/workflows/laravel-ci.yml (excerpt)
name: CI
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    services:
      mysql:
        image: mysql:8
        env: { MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root, MYSQL_DATABASE: app_test }
        ports: ["3306:3306"]
        options: >-
          --health-cmd="mysqladmin ping -h 127.0.0.1 -proot"
          --health-interval=10s --health-timeout=5s --health-retries=5
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
        with: { php-version: '8.3', coverage: none, tools: composer:v2 }
      - name: Cache Composer
        uses: actions/cache@v4
        with: { path: ~/.composer/cache/files, key: ${{ runner.os }}-composer-${{ hashFiles('**/composer.lock') }} }
      - run: composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist
      - run: cp .env.ci .env && php artisan key:generate
      - run: php artisan migrate --force
      - run: vendor/bin/pest --ci || vendor/bin/phpunit --testdox

2) Performance & Caching

• OPcache tuned; config:cache and route:cache in builds
• Redis for cache/sessions; Horizon to watch queues
• HTTP caching with CDN; image/WebP and font hygiene

3) Database & Queues

• Indexes for hot queries; fix N+1s with eager loading
• Queue isolation for critical work; idempotent jobs with retries/backoff
• Slow query sampling in APM; read replicas only where safe

4) Reliability & Security

• SLOs, alerts and runbooks; incident templates
• Least‑privilege IAM; secrets in SSM/Secrets Manager
• Backups, PITR and DR drills

Conclusion

Whether you’re modernising a legacy PHP app or scaling a Laravel SaaS, our approach keeps delivery fast and production calm.

Written by Ahmad
Ahmad Hassan, Senior engineer with 10+ years in PHP, Laravel and Rails. He builds web and mobile apps with React/Next and TypeScript, and delivers backend systems in PHP and Ruby.