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PHP Deployment Pipeline

devops PHP 5.0+ Intermediate

Also Known As

PHP CI/CD pipeline PHP deployment deploy PHP application

TL;DR

A complete CI/CD pipeline for PHP — from push to production — covering lint, test, build, staging deploy, smoke test, and production release.

Explanation

A mature PHP deployment pipeline: (1) Push triggers CI — composer install --no-dev, phpcs, phpstan analyse, phpunit --coverage-clover, security audit. (2) Docker image built from production Dockerfile — tagged with git SHA. (3) Image pushed to container registry. (4) Staging deploy — image rolled out to staging environment, migrations run, smoke tests executed against staging. (5) Manual or automatic approval gate. (6) Production deploy — rolling or blue/green, zero downtime, post-deploy health check. (7) Automated rollback if health check fails. Tools: GitHub Actions / GitLab CI for orchestration, Deployer or Kubernetes for deployment, Sentry for error monitoring post-release. Keep the pipeline fast — under 10 minutes total is the target. Flaky tests erode trust and must be fixed immediately.

Common Misconception

✗ FTP uploading files to a server is a valid PHP deployment strategy. Manual file uploads introduce inconsistency, cannot be rolled back atomically, skip tests, and leave the server in a mixed state mid-deploy. Atomic deployments via symlink switching ensure the server either runs the old or new version, never a mix.

Why It Matters

A PHP deployment pipeline automates the path from commit to production — reducing human error, ensuring tests always run, and making deployments a non-event rather than a stressful manual procedure.

Common Mistakes

  • No zero-downtime deploy — FPM restart during traffic causes dropped requests.
  • Running composer install on production instead of deploying vendor/ or a built artifact.
  • Not clearing OPcache after deploy — stale bytecode serves old code.
  • No smoke test after deploy — a broken deploy serves errors until someone notices.

Code Examples

✗ Vulnerable 
# Naive deploy — causes downtime:
git pull origin main
composer install          # Runs on live server
php artisan migrate       # Runs on live server
systemctl restart php-fpm # Drops in-flight requests

# Better: atomic symlink swap after all prep is done on idle copy
✓ Fixed 
# PHP deployment pipeline — .github/workflows/deploy.yml

steps:
  # 1. Install dependencies (production only)
  - run: composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader --no-interaction

  # 2. Quality gates (fail fast)
  - run: composer audit                    # CVE check
  - run: vendor/bin/phpcs --standard=PSR12 # code style
  - run: vendor/bin/phpstan analyse        # type errors
  - run: vendor/bin/phpunit                # tests

  # 3. Build assets
  - run: npm ci && npm run build

  # 4. Deploy
  - run: rsync -az --delete public/ deploy@prod:/var/www/app/public/

  # 5. Migrations (backwards-compatible first)
  - run: ssh deploy@prod 'php /var/www/app/artisan migrate --force'

  # 6. Cache warm + graceful restart
  - run: ssh deploy@prod 'php /var/www/app/artisan optimize && sudo systemctl reload php8.3-fpm'

  # 7. Health check
  - run: curl --fail https://yourapp.com/health
Added 15 Mar 2026
Edited 22 Mar 2026
Views 46

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Also referenced
Continuous Deployment (CD) 29 Containerisation (Docker for PHP) 29 Continuous Integration (CI) 28 Zero Downtime Deployment 26
How they use it
crawler 39 crawler_json 3 pre-tracking 1
Related categories
devops 1k
⚡ DEV INTEL Tools & Severity
🟠 High ⚙ Fix effort: High
⚡ Quick Fix
Structure your PHP pipeline: composer install → phpcs → phpstan → test → build docker image → push to registry → deploy to staging → smoke test → deploy to production
📦 Applies To
PHP 5.0+ web cli laravel symfony
🔗 Prerequisites
🔍 Detection Hints
No automated deployment pipeline; manual composer install on server; no rollback mechanism; deployment requires SSH access to production
Auto-detectable: ✗ No github-actions gitlab-ci deployer envoyer capistrano
⚠ Related Problems
🤖 AI Agent
Confidence: Low False Positives: Medium ✗ Manual fix Fix: High Context: File Tests: Update
✓ schema.org compliant