Download the PHP package codinglabsau/yolo-alpha without Composer

[!IMPORTANT] YOLO Alpha is frozen — bug fixes only. This is the pre-1.0 EC2/ASG deployer extracted from codinglabsau/yolo so it can run side-by-side with YOLO 1.0 (Fargate) during the LP cutover window. New work happens on codinglabsau/yolo.

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

The CLI tool lives inside your Laravel app in vendor/bin/yolo-alpha, 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.

Interactive Video Service (IVS)

AWS IVS is Amazon's managed low-latency live video streaming service. For apps that use IVS, YOLO captures all IVS state-change events to CloudWatch via EventBridge for audit and debugging.

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.

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

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

Run yolo-alpha to see the available commands.

b) Initialise yolo-alpha

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

1. initialises the yolo.yml file in the app with a boilerplate production environment
2. adds some entries to .gitignore
3. 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-alpha sync <environment>. This command runs all sync commands in the correct order.

The full list of available sync commands are:

• yolo-alpha sync:network <environment> prepares the VPC, subnets, security groups and SSH keys
• yolo-alpha sync:standalone <environment> prepares standalone app resources (standalone apps only)
• yolo-alpha sync:landlord <environment> prepares landlord resources (multitenancy apps only)
• yolo-alpha sync:tenant <environment> prepares tenant resources (multitenancy apps only)
• yolo-alpha sync:compute <environment> prepares the compute resources
• yolo-alpha sync:ci <environment> prepares the continuous integration pipeline
• yolo-alpha sync:iam <environment> prepares necessary permissions
• yolo-alpha sync:logging <environment> prepares observability infrastructure (e.g. IVS state-change events)

[!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-alpha image:create <environment> to generate a new AMI.

b) Prepare the image for traffic

To prepare a new stage, run yolo-alpha 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.

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-alpha env:push <environment>.

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

Step 5. Building and deploying

Builds can be created with yolo-alpha build <environment>.

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

Builds can be deployed with yolo-alpha deploy <environment>.

[!TIP] You can also build and deploy in a single command with yolo-alpha 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-alpha init.

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:

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-alpha 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:

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.

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.

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:

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

Credits

• Steve Thomas
• All Contributors

License

MIT