Forge: Octane Support

Back in March, Taylor announced the new Laravel Octane project at Laracon Online. Since then, we’ve been busy working on bug fixes and enhancements to Octane, as well as adding support to Laravel Forge.

Today we’re pleased to announce that Octane support is available in Forge. We’ve written the guide below to help you get started. Please keep in mind that Octane is still in beta and should not be used in production.

Prerequisites

Your project must require "laravel/octane": "^0.3.2" or above. Your server must have PHP 8.0 installed.

You should then follow the Octane installation instructions listed in the Octane repository.

Creating an Octane Site

Octane can be enabled by selecting the Laravel Octane (Beta) project type option and PHP 8.0 as the PHP version that should be used to serve your site:

Once the project type has been selected, Forge will ask for the port that Octane should listen on.

Unlike other project types, Octane will not use PHP-FPM to serve your site. Instead, Octane starts its own RoadRunner or Swoole server (your choice) and uses Nginx as a reverse proxy to the port you select. It is wise to choose a high port number such as 8000 to prevent clashes with other software that may be running on your server.

When creating your site, Forge will install the Swoole extension if it has not already been installed on your server. All new servers that are provisioned with PHP 8.0 will automatically receive this extension.

Configuring the Octane Daemon

Once your Octane powered site has been created in Forge, you’ll notice two important differences compared to a standard FPM project:

1. The Deploy Script does not reload PHP-FPM, instead it’ll check the status of the Octane server and issue a reload command to the Octane server.
2. There is a new Laravel Octane (Beta) panel which displays the information you’ll need to properly configure the daemon.

You should use this information to create the Daemon that will manage your Octane server. Since the Octane server is a long running process, the Daemon will monitor the process and automatically restart Octane if it crashes:

Let’s quickly break down the command that Forge has generated for us:

php8.0 artisan octane:start --port=8000 --no-interaction

• We ensure that octane:start runs with the PHP 8.0 binary.
• We tell Octane to listen on port 8000.
• We run the command with the --no-interaction option so that Octane will install any dependencies for us such as rr (the RoadRunner binary) if necessary.

Once your Daemon has been created, your Octane site should now be accessible via your web browser!

If you don’t have a Forge account, now is a great time to sign up! Forge allows you to painlessly create and manage PHP servers which include MySQL, Redis, Memcached, database backups, and everything else you need to run robust, modern Laravel applications.