Deploy Laravel to AWS EC2 With Zero Downtime Releases

How do I deploy a Laravel project on AWS?

Launch an EC2 instance, install Nginx, PHP-FPM, Composer and a database, point the web root at the project's public folder, set up Supervisor for queue workers and a cron entry for the scheduler, then deploy from Git. That is the manual route that most of the tutorials ranking for this question walk through, and it works. The problem shows up on the second deploy: a plain git pull into the live directory leaves the site broken for the seconds that composer install and the migrations take, and nothing records what changed.

The same job with a panel takes four steps. You give DeployManage an IAM access key, it launches the instance and installs the stack, you connect the repository, and every push becomes an atomic zero downtime release that builds in its own directory before traffic moves to it. The instance is still yours: it shows up in the EC2 console, it is billed to your account, and you can SSH into it as root.

Which AWS service is best for Laravel?

For most Laravel apps, EC2 is the best AWS service: it runs Laravel exactly as it runs on your laptop, with a writable disk, Redis, Horizon and the scheduler, and it costs about $21 a month for a t3.small with storage and a public IP. Elastic Beanstalk is a good fit if you want AWS to handle scaling groups and are comfortable maintaining platform hooks. Vapor on Lambda suits spiky, stateless traffic, but it has no persistent disk and pushes queues onto SQS.

If you are weighing the first and third rows, the Elastic Beanstalk vs EC2 cost comparison works through four real bills line by line.

How much does it cost to host Laravel on AWS?

One Laravel app on a t3.small EC2 instance in us-east-1 costs about $21.23 a month on-demand: $15.18 for the instance, $2.40 for a 30 GB gp3 volume and $3.65 for the public IPv4 address. A t3.medium doubles the instance line to $30.37. An Application Load Balancer adds $16.43 a month in hourly charges plus capacity units, which put a small app at about $22. Data transfer out, RDS and backups come on top of all of these. If that app is small and sends a lot of traffic, compare it with a $12 Lightsail bundle first; our Lightsail vs EC2 pricing bills show when the bundle wins.

Here is what the full monthly bill looks like for three common setups, with each tool's fee added to the same AWS resources.

The second row adds up as two t3.medium at $30.37, two 30 GB volumes at $2.40, two public IPs at $3.65 and one load balancer at about $22.27. Read the table honestly: Beanstalk and Forge are cheaper on software in every row. What the DeployManage fee buys is 10 seats with an audit log, the same atomic release across several instances without a second vendor, and one panel for AWS and any other cloud VPS you run.

Can I use Laravel Forge with AWS?

Yes. Laravel Forge links to an AWS account through an IAM user with EC2 and VPC permissions and can create EC2 servers for you, from $12 a month on Hobby. Forge's own documentation lists AWS as a supported server provider. The limit that matters on AWS is the deploy, not the provisioning: Forge's native zero downtime deployments run on one server per site, cannot be switched on for an existing site, and cannot be used by a site that already deploys to several servers. That is why AWS teams with a load balancer usually add Envoyer from $10 a month. If that pairing is your situation, the Envoyer alternative page compares the two bills directly, and the Laravel Forge alternative page covers the wider shortlist.

Is Laravel Vapor worth it compared to EC2?

Vapor is worth it when traffic is spiky and the app is already stateless; for a steady app with Horizon, file uploads to local disk or long running jobs, EC2 is simpler and usually cheaper. Vapor's Unlimited plan is $39 a month or $399 a year, AWS usage is billed separately, and Vapor's own docs note that a private database adds a NAT gateway billed at about $32 a month. Lambda gives you no persistent filesystem and runs queues through SQS, so apps built around Redis queues need changes before they move. Vapor also no longer accepts new signups, so for a new project it is off the list; existing accounts keep running, and Laravel points them toward Laravel Cloud. The Laravel Vapor alternative page covers that in detail.

What the tutorials leave out about Laravel on Elastic Beanstalk

Beanstalk's PHP platform will run a Laravel app, but four jobs that a server does by default need extra configuration. The document root has to be set to /public. Migrations need a container command marked leader only so they run once and not on every instance. The scheduler needs a cron entry written by a platform hook. And queue workers either run under a hook you maintain or move to a separate worker environment, which receives SQS messages over HTTP rather than reading from Redis.

None of that is hard the first time. It becomes a cost because it lives in config files that only one person on the team understands, and because instance replacement discards anything done by hand over SSH. Teams usually leave Beanstalk for plain EC2 when a platform update breaks one of those hooks during a release. For the day to day side of keeping workers alive after that move, see our guide to Laravel queue workers under Supervisor.

Who DeployManage on AWS is for, and who should skip it

Buy it if your team has three or more developers deploying to AWS, runs anything behind a load balancer, or manages client apps in accounts it does not own. The value is in seats, the audit log, and one release process across every instance and every cloud.

Skip it if you are one developer with one app. Hand built EC2 or Forge Hobby at $12 will do the job for less, and we would rather say so here than lose your trust after the invoice. If you are not tied to AWS at all, a DigitalOcean or Hetzner server is cheaper for the same memory, and the Laravel deployment page covers those providers. If the requirement is Google rather than Amazon, the deploy Laravel to Google Cloud page prices Compute Engine and Cloud Run the same way.