Provisioning Laravel Projects with Vapor CLI

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you should have a functional Laravel application and a Laravel Vapor account linked to an Amazon Web Services profile. Familiarity with the terminal and Composer is essential, as the setup relies heavily on CLI interactions.

Key Libraries & Tools

• Vapor CLI: The primary tool for managing serverless deployments.
• Vapor Core: A required Composer package that provides the necessary service providers for the serverless environment.
• AWS VPC: Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud, used to isolate your infrastructure.

Code Walkthrough

Navigate to your project root and execute the initialization command:

vapor init

Project Identification and Geography

The CLI first prompts for your Project Name. Following this, you must select an Amazon Web Services Region. Choosing a region like us-east-1 is more than a technicality; it is a latency decision. You want your code running as close to your end-users as possible to reduce round-trip times.

Installing the Core Provider

Once the project is registered, Vapor asks to install the core library:

composer require laravel/vapor-core

This package is non-negotiable. It contains the logic that allows Laravel to interpret the requests coming from the serverless runtime.

Syntax Notes

The vapor init command is idempotent regarding your local files but creates live resources in the Laravel Vapor dashboard. It generates a vapor.yml file in your root directory, which acts as the blueprint for your environments and deployment hooks.

Practical Examples

• Staging vs. Production: Use environments to test new features in a mirror of production before a final rollout.
• Network Isolation: Vapor automatically creates a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). This keeps your databases and caches hidden from the public internet, accessible only by your application.

Tips & Gotchas

Always verify your Amazon Web Services account limits before running init. If Vapor fails to create a new Network (VPC), you might have hit the default Amazon Web Services limit for VPCs in that specific region.