README

Important

This package is in active development - contributions are welcome!

YOLO helps you deploy high-availability PHP applications to AWS.

The CLI tool lives inside your Laravel app in vendor/bin/yolo, and takes care of provisioning and configuring all required resources on AWS, coupled with build and deployment commands to deploy applications to production from your local machine or CI pipeline.

YOLO has been battle-tested on apps that serve 2 million requests per day.

Features

Autoscaling Worker Groups

YOLO provisions an Application Load Balancer and autoscaling groups (web, queue, scheduler) for each environment.

Each group is self-healing should an instance become unresponsive, and the web group automatically scales up to handle traffic bursts.

In addition, worker groups can be combined (coming soon) to a single EC2 instance to consolidate small workloads.

Resource Sharing

YOLO shares various resources between applications to reduce costs.

Zero-downtime Deployments

YOLO leverages AWS CodeDeploy to perform zero-downtime deployments, which can be triggered from the CLI or via a CI pipeline.

Multi-tenancy

Specify tenants in the manifest and YOLO will take care of provisioning resources for each tenant.

.env Management

Manage .env files locally with push and pull commands. Preview changes before deploying.

S3

Leverage S3 for storing build artefacts and user data files.

Octane (experimental)

YOLO supports Laravel Octane for turbocharged PHP applications.

Video Transcoding

YOLO can configure your app environment to utilise video transcoding using AWS Elemental MediaConvert.

And Much More...

Least priviledge permissions with strong segregation across environments and apps
Seperate commands that run on deployment across worker groups
Scheduled MySQL backups using mysqldump
Control of build and deploy commands
Re-use existing VPCs, subnets, internet gateways and more

Disclaimer

YOLO is designed for PHP developers who are comfortable managing AWS using an infrastructure-as-code approach.

It is, at it's core, a Symfony CLI app that leverages the AWS SDK, rather than CloudFormation / Terraform / K8s / Elastic Beanstalk / .

While YOLO has underpinned very large, mission-critical production applications, it is not intended to be a set and forget solution; rather it acts as a control plane that allows you to manage and expand your AWS footprint over time.

It goes without saying, but use YOLO at your own risk.

Prerequisites

You'll need access to an AWS account, and some knowledge of AWS services.

Domains on Route53

The domains for your app should be added to Route53 on the same AWS account as where the app is hosted in advance.

Permissions & Authentication

YOLO uses AWS profiles for authentication.

Profiles are stored in ~/.aws/credentials for authentication. You'll need to set a YOLO_{ENVIRONMENT}_AWS_PROFILE in the app .env file to point to the correct profile; eg.

YOLO_PRODUCTION_AWS_PROFILE=my-project-profile

Once configured, future operations will authenticate using this profile.

You will need wide-ranging AWS credentials to provision everything required by YOLO; administrative permissions are recommended.

For CI environments like GitHub Actions, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY are used instead. Ensure that any access keys provided in CI are using least-privileged scope.

Step 1: Installation

a) Install With Composer

composer require codinglabsau/yolo

The entry point to the YOLO CLI is vendor/bin/yolo or yolo if you have ./vendor/bin in your path.

Run yolo to see the available commands.

b) Initialise yolo

Next, run yolo init. The init command does the following:

initialises the yolo.yml file in the app with a boilerplate production environment
adds some entries to .gitignore
prompts for a few bits of information to setup the manifest file

After initialising, you can customise the yolo.yml manifest file to suit your app's requirements.

Step 2: Provision resources

YOLO is designed to create and manage all AWS resources required to run your application.

Provision all resources by running yolo sync <environment>. This command runs all sync commands in the correct order.

The full list of available sync commands are:

yolo sync:network <environment> prepares the VPC, subnets, security groups and SSH keys
yolo sync:standalone <environment> prepares standalone app resources (standalone apps only)
yolo sync:landlord <environment> prepares landlord resources (multitenancy apps only)
yolo sync:tenant <environment> prepares tenant resources (multitenancy apps only)
yolo sync:compute <environment> prepares the compute resources
yolo sync:ci <environment> prepares the continuous integration pipeline
yolo sync:iam <environment> prepares necessary permissions

Tip

All sync commands support a --dry-run argument; this is a great starting point to see what resources will be created or modified without any actual changes occurring on AWS.

Step 3: Prepare a server image

With all the low-level resource provisioned via the sync commands, the next step is to create an Amazon Machine Image ( AMI) with Ubuntu OS as the foundation.

The image will be used as the initial disk image for all server instances, and can be updated over time to bring in improvements, such as new PHP versions.

a) Create an image

Run yolo image:create <environment> to generate a new AMI.

b) Prepare the image for traffic

To prepare a new stage, run yolo stage <environment>.

This interactive command walks you through updating or replacing the current stage configuration.

New stages have the benefit of allowing testing before migrating production workloads over, however simply updating the existing stage is recommended for minor changes.

Situation	Recommended strategy
Update EC2 security group	update
Update EC2 type	update
Update EC2 instance profile	update
Update AMI	create

When creating a new stage, the yolo.yml manifest will also be updated to point to the new autoscaling groups on the next deployment.

Note

Rotating in a new image does not have any impact on existing traffic until the updated manifest is deployed - the previous deployment will continue serving requests and autoscaling as per normal.

Step 4. Setup .env file

You'll need to push the initial .env file for the environment. Environment files are stored in the S3 artefacts bucket, and retrieved during deployment.

If you have an existing .env file, be sure to copy that over to .env.<environment> in the root of the app, otherwise you can build on the stub provided by the init command.

To push the .env file to the artefacts bucket, run yolo env:push <environment>.

After the initial push, you can retrieve the .env file with yolo env:pull <environment>.

Step 5. Building and deploying

Builds can be created with yolo build <environment>.

The build command takes care of building a deployment-ready directory in ./yolo.

Builds can be deployed with yolo deploy <environment>.

Tip

You can also build and deploy in a single command with yolo deploy <environment>.

yolo.yml

This is a complete yolo.yml manifest file, showing default values where applicable.

Note that some keys below are intentionally omitted from the stub generated by yolo init.

name: codinglabs
timezone: UTC

environments:
  production:
    aws:
      account-id:
      region: ap-southeast-2
      vpc:
      internet-gateway:
      public-subnets:
      route-table:
      bucket:
      artefacts-bucket:
      cloudfront:
      alb:
      mediaconvert: false
      autoscaling:
        web:
        queue:
        scheduler:
        combine: false
      ec2:
        instance-type: t3.small
        queue-instance-type:
        scheduler-instance-type:
        octane: false
        key-pair:
        security-group:
      rds:
        subnet:
        security-group:
      codedeploy:
        strategy: without-load-balancing|with-load-balancing

    asset-url: # defaults to aws.cloudfront
    mysqldump: false

    domain: example.com # standalone apps only
    apex: # standalone apps only

    tenants: # multi-tenanted apps only
      boating: # unique key for the tenant
        domain: boating-with-yolo.com

      fishing: # unique key for the tenant
        domain: fishing-with-yolo.com

    build:
      - composer install --no-cache --no-interaction --optimize-autoloader --no-progress --classmap-authoritative --no-dev
      - npm ci
      - npm run build
      - rm -rf package-lock.json resources/js resources/css node_modules database/seeders database/factories resources/seeding

    deploy: #runs on scheduler
      - php artisan migrate --force

    deploy-queue: # runs on queue
      -

    deploy-web: # runs on web
      -

    deploy-all: # runs on all instances
      - php artisan optimize

Continuous Integration

The app version can be specified as an option with --app-version to the build and deploy commands.

The recommended approach is to tag your GitHub releases with a date-based naming convention, and then forward the tag to your deploy action, similar to the following:

- name: Deploy
    run: php vendor/bin/yolo deploy production --app-version=${{ github.event.release.tag_name }}
    env:
      AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.PRODUCTION_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
      AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.PRODUCTION_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

The current app version must start with year.week, for example 25.3 to represent the third week of 2025. After the year and week, use whatever convention you like; a common approach is to increment the third digit for each release, for example 25.3.1, 25.3.2, etc.

Because the app version is validated during the build and utilises the UTC timezone by default, you may wish to set the manifest timezone option to the timezone of your team to prevent validation errors at the start of the week if your timezone is ahead of UTC.

Domains

Applications hosted with yolo can be served on any domain or subdomain that you own.

The domain should be added to Route53 in advance.

For a standalone application, the domain key can be used:

    domain: codinglabs.com.au

In this example, the app will be served on codinglabs.com.au, and www.codinglabs.com.au will redirect to codinglabs.com.au.

If the application is served on any subdomain (including www.) you'll need to specify the apex record as well.

    apex: codinglabs.com.au
    domain: www.codinglabs.com.au

In this example, the app will be served on www.codinglabs.com.au, and codinglabs.com.au will redirect to www.codinglabs.com.au.

Multi-tenant applications follow the same logic, except that domains are configured under the tenants key.

    tenants:
      boating:
        domain: boating.outdoors-with-yolo.com
        apex: outdoors-with-yolo.com

      camping:
        domain: camping.outdoors-with-yolo.com
        apex: outdoors-with-yolo.com

      fishing:
        domain: fishing-with-yolo.com

Development

To debug or add features to YOLO, it is recommended to symlink to the local repository.

Add this to composer.json with the path to the local repository:

"repositories": [
    {
    "type": "path",
    "url": "/Users/username/code/yolo"
    }
],

To call yolo from the app you are debugging, you'll need to tell yolo the path to the app. Set the YOLO_BASE_PATH environment to the root of the app as follows:

YOLO_BASE_PATH=$(pwd) yolo

Credits

License

MIT

codinglabsau / yolo

Maintainers

Details