Setting Up AWS CI/CD Pipelines for Laravel Applications

Deploying Laravel applications to AWS doesn’t have to be painful. After setting up CI/CD pipelines for multiple production SaaS platforms, here’s my battle-tested approach.

The Pipeline Architecture

A solid Laravel CI/CD pipeline on AWS consists of three stages:

1. Source — Pull from GitHub/GitLab
2. Build — Run tests, compile assets, prepare artifacts
3. Deploy — Push to EC2 with zero downtime

Setting Up CodeBuild

Your buildspec.yml is the heart of the build stage:

version: 0.2
phases:
  install:
    runtime-versions:
      php: 8.2
      nodejs: 18
    commands:
      - composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist
      - npm ci
  pre_build:
    commands:
      - php artisan test
  build:
    commands:
      - npm run build
      - php artisan config:cache
      - php artisan route:cache
      - php artisan view:cache
artifacts:
  files:
    - '**/*'

Zero-Downtime Deployments

The key to zero-downtime deployments is using a symlink strategy:

1. Deploy to a new release directory
2. Run migrations
3. Swap the symlink
4. Restart workers gracefully

CloudFront Integration

For static assets, I always recommend putting CloudFront in front of your application. The performance gains are significant, especially for global audiences.

Monitoring

Don’t forget to set up CloudWatch alarms for:

• CPU utilization above 80%
• Memory usage
• Queue depth (for Horizon/Redis)
• HTTP 5xx error rates

With this setup, every push to your main branch triggers a fully automated, tested deployment to production.