Deploy Laravel Apps, Schedule Database Backups And Manage Servers With Laravel

If your business runs on a web application built with PHP, keeping it online is a job of its own. Someone has to set up servers, add a staging environment, ship new versions without breaking the site, and make sure the database is backed up every night. Laravel sells the hosting and deployment tools for that, and both expose APIs, so your scripts, your team’s tools or an AI assistant can do the routine work instead of a person clicking through a control panel.

What Laravel does

Laravel is the company behind the Laravel PHP framework, and it sells a suite of commercial products around it. Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform for deploying and scaling Laravel and Symfony applications. Laravel Forge provisions servers and deploys applications across providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner and Vultr. Envoyer handles zero-downtime deployments, Vapor runs applications serverless on AWS Lambda, Nightwatch monitors them and Nova is an administration panel. Laravel also ships Laravel Boost, a first-party MCP server that gives AI coding agents access to Laravel documentation and context.

What you can get done

Environment Management

An environment is a separate copy of your application, such as production for customers and staging for testing. Managing them through the API keeps every copy set up the same way.

• GET /applications/{application}/environments lists an application’s environments.
• POST /applications/{application}/environments adds a new environment, such as staging.
• GET /environments/{environment} returns the settings of one environment.
• GET /environments/{environment}/logs searches an environment’s application logs over a time range.

Disaster Recovery & Resilience

Backups are only useful if they actually run. These calls set and check the schedule for database backups on a Forge server.

• POST /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/database/backups schedules database backups to your storage provider.
• GET /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/database/backups lists the backup schedules on a server.
• GET /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/database/backups/{backupConfiguration} shows the schedule and retention of one configuration.
• PUT /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/database/backups/{backupConfiguration} changes how often a backup runs.

Deployment Orchestration

Deployment is putting a new version of your app live. A deployment webhook tells your other systems, like a chat channel or a test runner, the moment it finishes.

• POST /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/sites/{site}/webhooks adds a URL to call every time a site finishes deploying.
• GET /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/sites/{site}/webhooks lists the deployment webhooks for a site.
• GET /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/sites/{site}/webhooks/{deploymentWebhook} shows where one webhook points.
• DELETE /orgs/{organization}/servers/{server}/sites/{site}/webhooks/{deploymentWebhook} stops a site calling an old URL.

IT Infrastructure Management

Underneath the app sit databases. Laravel Cloud lets you create managed ones without running database servers yourself.

• GET /databases/types lists the kinds of managed databases you can create.
• GET /databases/clusters lists your organization’s database clusters.
• POST /databases/clusters creates a managed database cluster.

Identity & Access Management

As a team grows, not everyone should be able to delete a server. Roles control who can do what.

• GET /predefined-roles lists Forge’s built-in roles.
• GET /predefined-roles/{role} shows what a built-in role grants.
• GET /permissions lists every permission you can assign to a role.

Ask for it in plain language

Laravel has 40 phrasing overlays on APIs.io. They map plain questions to the operation that answers them, so an AI assistant knows which call to make. These are the kinds of questions they cover:

• How do I add a staging environment to my application?
• Where can I read the application logs for an environment over a time range?
• How do I schedule nightly database backups to my storage provider?
• How can I get pinged at my own URL every time a site finishes deploying?
• Which database clusters does my organization have?

The Laravel Applications API phrasing overlay is a good one to look at first.

Getting started

Laravel’s hosting products are paid, hosted services you call over the web. Plans are in the pricing section of its APIs.io profile; as one example, Starter is listed at $5 per month plus usage. Start with the Forge API reference, the Forge API documentation and the Envoyer API documentation.

The Laravel profile on APIs.io lists every API, including the Laravel Applications API, the Laravel Backups API and the Envoyer API. If you automate one thing this week, make it the backup schedule, because it is the one you will be glad of later.