Automating The Deployment of a Codeigniter/PHP Website with Deployer

by Joe Jean | on January 29, 2017 | php codeigniter programming

About 4 months ago, I started using some of my free time to help build Labocine.com, an amazing new platform for science cinema. The back-end is written using the PHP framework Codeigniter. Being at its early stage, the site was hosted on one of those traditional hosting providers. And the deployment of new features was done using the traditional ftp approach. After joining the project and as it grew, I decided to host it on a VPS and automate the deployment process. My goal for this post is to show you how you can easily automate the deployment of your Codeigniter web application, or any PHP web application for that matter.

Before we can proceed, you need to make sure of two things. First, your project needs to be version controlled and available on a git hosting service such as Github, Bitbucket or Gitlab. Second, you need to have ssh access to the server where your application is (to be) hosted.

The deployment tool we are going to use is called Deployer. Let’s start by installing it in our Codeigniter project. I recommend using composer for the installation. Assuming you have composer installed on your computer, run the following command in the root of your project repository.


    composer require-dev deployer/deployer

You should now have a bin folder along with a deployer folder inside the vendor folder in your application root.

Now, while still in the root of the project repository, let’s create a file called deploy.php. This file, called a recipe, will contain the custom deployment configurations that Deployer will be relying upon to deploy your application. Following is an example deploy.php.


require 'recipe/codeigniter.php';
set('default_stage', 'live');
server('SERVER_NAME', 'SERVER_IP_ADDRESS')
    ->identityFile()
    ->user('YOUR_USERNAME_ON_SERVER')
    ->stage('live')
    ->env('deploy_path', '/var/www/html/app');
 set('repository', '-b branch-name [email protected]:test/SAMPLEREPO.git');

Now let’s go over the content of deploy.php. Since we are going to deploy a Codeigniter application , our deploy.php recipe needs to extend the Codeigniter recipe, and this is what we do in the second line. If you are using another framework, you can find the list of all the supported recipes here. On the 3rd line, we set the default stage. The stage is more like an environment and in our case we set it to live. So, your stage could be development, staging etc. Next, we configure our server where our code will be deployed. We give the server a name, any name we want, and we provide its IP address. In the following line, we use identityFile() to tell Deployer that we want to connect to our server using ssh and the ssh keys are located in our .ssh folder. If your keys are located somewhere else or if they were created with a password you can still pass the the full path to your keys as follows:


identityFile("~/path_to_ssh_folder/id_rsa.pub","~/path_to_ssh_folder/id_rsa", "pass phrase");

You can also configure Deployer to log into your server using a username and password, please see the documentation for an example on how to do that. In the next 3 lines we pass it the username with which to ssh into our server, we tie this server to a stage which is the default stage in this case, and we provide the path where our application should be deployed. The last thing we need to do is to specify the git repository which contains the code to be deployed. It is important to note that in this example we are using one server, but you can configure however many servers you want in your deploy.php.

Now we are ready to deploy our app. In order to do so we just need to type, while in the root of our project,

php vendor/bin/dep deploy live

php vendor/bin/dep deploy SERVER_NAME

Since we set the default stage to `live`, we can also just do `php vendor/bin/dep deploy`.

After deploying, if something breaks, rolling back to the previous working version of your site is as easy as

php vendor/bin/dep rollback live

Imagine you create a new branch, work on it, commit and push your changes. In order to deploy those changes, you need to manually go into the deploy.php file and change the branch name in the last line:

set(‘repository’, ‘-b branch-name [email protected]:test/SAMPLEREPO.git’);

This is a bit tedious, isn’t it? Instead, we can just create a pre-commit hook that will go and make that change for us every time we commit. Here is what my .git/hooks/pre-commit looks like:


branch=$(git branch | sed -n -e 's/^\* \(.*\)/\1/p')
sed -i '$ d' deploy.php
echo "set('repository', '-b $branch [email protected]:test/SAMPLEREPO.git');">> deploy.php
git add deploy.php

With something like that in place, I do not need to manually edit the deploy.php every time I want to deploy a new branch. After a git push I can do a dep deploy and be sure that my latest changes on my new branch will get deployed.

If you use Deployer in some other interesting ways, or if you use other tools for your deployment, please feel free to leave a comment below.