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What would make Laravel Forge even better

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

A little over a year ago Laravel Forge was launched. At Spatie we currently have 60 servers that are provisioned by and administered using it. I'm assuming we still hold the biggest Forge-account. By this time next year the number of servers will probably be higher. So yeah, I'm a very happy customer.

But no service is perfect. Here's a list of things that would make a great service even better:

  • the only way you can interact with Forge now is through the website. It would be great if there was a API to create and administer servers. Image being able to programatically spin up new servers, or start/stop a queue. Related to an API, a command line tool would be very handy as well.
  • when provisioning DigitalOcean servers using Forge there is an option to enable backups. Unfortunately those backups are only taken once every week. For our clients this is not acceptable. When relying solely on the DO backup service, days of work could potentially be lost. Sure, you could resort to enterprise grade solutions like BackupPC or Bacula, but you'll have to learn setting it up. It would be awesome if Forge could take care of backups. I'm imaging that it could work similar to ottomatik.io: just point it to where files should be backupped to and it'll handle all the rest.
  • every PHP-developer is looking forward to PHP7. Forge could help migrating to PHP7 by providing a one click upgrade button.
  • when provisioning a new server we'll often added swap memory to it afterwards. Forge could make this easier by providing it as an option when provisioning a new server.
In a few weeks Laracon will start. Like last year, I'm really curious what Taylor will unveil. I'm even looking forward to it more than Apple's WWDC (insert smiley here). It would be great if some of the things mentioned above would become reality.

If you have some thoughts on how Forge can be improved, let me know in the comments below.

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