A Laravel / Vercel boilerplate template with php 8.2

This project will help you get started with a new Laravel project hosted on Vercel. It includes a basic setup for a Laravel project with a Vercel deployment pipeline.

The initial purpose of this repo was benchmarking a Laravel project's performance with Vercel's serverless functions and the least performant droplet on digitalocean, results can be found in this thread.

The project is setup to use:

• PHP 8.2
• Laravel 11
• Serverless SQLite or Supabase as a database engine
• GitHub actions for deployment

The goal of this project is to provide a quick starting point as an alternative to (my case) DigitalOcean to run little projects with no cost.

Setup

• create a new GitHub project using this template repo

local development / digitalocean setup

• install dependencies:
  • composer install
• copy .env.example to .env and update your database credentials
  • cp .env.example .env
• clone your repo and create a laravel app key:
  • php artisan key:generate
• set permissions:
  • chmod -R 777 storage bootstrap/cache
• database permissions:
  • chmod 777 database/database.sqlite
• install sqlite module:
  • sudo apt-get install php8.x-sqlite3

Getting your secrets

• clone your repo and create a laravel app key:
  • php artisan key:generate
• Vercel: link your GitHub repo
  • type: other
  • deploy (it will fail and it's okay)
• get your Vercel token & project/organization ids:
  • https://vercel.com/moghwan/[YOUR-PROJECT]/settings > Project ID
    • change node js version to 18
  • https://vercel.com/account > Vercel ID (organization id)
  • https://vercel.com/account/tokens > create a new token (name it VERCEL_LARACEL_TOKEN for example)
• database
  • Supabase:
    • create a new project, password will be needed
    • go to connect > copy uri
  • sqlite:
    • a dummy db is already provided in the repo
    • to use it, comment line 29 and uncomment line 30-31 in .github/workflows/main.yml

Setting your secrets

• Vercel: settings > environment variables
  • DB_URL: copied uri, replace [YOUR-PASSWORD] with your Supabase project password
  • APP_KEY: project id
• GitHub: settings > secrets & variables > actions > new repository secret
  • DB_URL: copied uri, replace [YOUR-PASSWORD] with your Supabase project password
  • VERCEL_LARACEL_TOKEN: copied token
  • VERCEL_ORG_ID: copied organization id
  • VERCEL_PROJECT_ID: copied project id
  • SENTRY_LARAVEL_DSN: your sentry dsn (optional)
• GitHub: actions > redeploy last action

Keep in mind

• Deployments are done with GitHub Actions and Vercel cli, not Vercel's auto deploy.
• Deployment via Vercel cli are run with the flag --force to avoid using cache, notably the composer.lock file.
• Database seeder are run with every deployment for demo purposes, disable it by commenting this line .github/workflows/main.yml:26
• This is a fresh Laravel 11 install, these following changes are made as needed:
  • api/index.php - the entry point for the Vercel serverless function.
  • dist/ - an empty folder for the default Vercel deployment output.
  • .github/workflows/main.yml - a GitHub Actions workflow file to deploy the app to Vercel.
  • vercel.json - a Vercel configuration file to define the serverless function and the php runtime.
  • database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php - using User factory to seed users table with data.
  • API endpoints are prefixed with /backend instead of /api.