I wanted to host a simple application to play around with the Tent Protocol (see my last blogpost), so I checked through some of the PHP Cloud providers again for the fun of it. One requirement was to deploy from Git and update dependencies from Composer. I found a new provider that i haven't heard of before, Fortrabbit that supports this so I had to check it out. It has some more features that I really dig:
Fortrabbit provides you with a Git url where you can push your repository. It is directly deployed during the push operation. You can trigger composer updates by having a special syntax in the commit message. The push output informs you about all the steps performed during deployment.
Additionally you can configure environment variables in the web-administration
interface that are available in the application through $_SERVER. You
can easily use them to configure your application, if its hosted in a public
repository. Great to share sample applications on Github and host them from
there.
You get SSH access to the machines, where you can take a look at the apache and php error log files. You have vim available. Quite cool and very helpful for any kind of debugging necessary. Deployments overwrite every change you make, so its still a save environment.
The composer support allows for post install scripts, which is cool to perform all sorts of cache warmup and other deployment tasks.
You can host one application for free, however they shutdown after 48 hours if you don't regularly click on a reset button. Its definitely enough to get small prototypes up and running. From there you can upgrade in many small steps from small plans (10€/month) to bigger ones (80€/month).