Keep Forge for your servers. Use symflip to deploy one Laravel project to two, five or twenty of them, with every server built before any goes live and automatic rollback across the fleet if the release fails its health check.
Deploying to two or more servers needs Team (€29/mo, cancel anytime).
Forge is a great way to run Laravel servers. On zero-downtime deploys, its own pages set a clear limit, for now:
Additionally, Forge only supports deployments with zero downtime on one server, unlike Envoyer which can deploy one project to multiple servers.Forge pricing FAQ [1]
Forge has a migration tool for Envoyer, but it is still limited to a single server. If you use Envoyer to deploy to multiple servers, you'll want to keep your subscription for the time being.Forge pricing FAQ [1]
Envoyer project must be connected to a single server.Forge Envoyer docs [2]
exclusively available for new sitesand can't be added to an existing site later. Forge deployment docs [3]
Note Laravel's own wording: "still" and "for the time being". This may change, and we re-check these pages regularly. Today, if your app runs on more than one server behind a load balancer, Forge puts traffic on both, but it doesn't deploy to both as one release. Forge's load balancing docs [4] cover routing traffic, not coordinated deploys.
Add every web server to a symflip project and click deploy. Each server fetches and builds the new release next to the live one. Only when every server is ready does each one switch, with one atomic symlink rename, all in parallel.
If Composer, your build or a hook fails on any server, nothing goes live anywhere. Every server keeps serving the release it had. If a server fails to switch, or the release fails its health check with auto-rollback on, the servers that already switched roll back so the fleet ends on one release. If a rollback itself fails, symflip says so loudly.
Mark one server as primary. php artisan migrate --force runs there, once, before any server goes live. A failed migration stops the deploy with the fleet untouched.
symflip deploys into its own directory (releases/, shared/, current), so it doesn't care when the site was created in Forge. Give it a new deploy path, point the site's nginx root at the new current/public once, and turn off Forge's push-to-deploy for that site so a push doesn't trigger both.
symflip keeps previous releases on every server (five by default, and you can change it), so rolling back is a symlink flip. A failed health check can roll the whole fleet back on its own. The one-click rollback button covers single-server projects today.
symflip connects over plain SSH. No agent runs on your servers, so nothing changes in how Forge manages them.
symflip is not a Forge replacement. It doesn't create servers, install PHP, manage nginx or issue certificates. Keep Forge (or Ploi, or Ansible) for that. symflip takes over the deploy.
symflip generates a separate Ed25519 deploy key for each server; you only
see the public line. Private keys and secrets are encrypted at rest and
only decrypted to open an SSH session or write shared/.env.
Remove the key from authorized_keys and symflip's access is
gone. Or self-host symflip and keep the keys on your own network.
How symflip handles your SSH keys and secrets.
| Feature | symflip | Laravel Forge |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-downtime deploy, one server | Yes, every plan | Yes, every plan [1] |
| Zero-downtime deploy, several servers | Yes, from Team (€29/mo) | No, Forge points multi-server projects to Envoyer [1][2] |
| Add to an existing site without recreating it | Yes, with a new deploy path and an nginx root change | No, new sites only [3] |
| All servers build before any goes live | Yes | n/a |
| Migrations run once on a chosen server | Yes | n/a |
| Health check after deploy | Yes, with optional automatic rollback | Notifies you; no automatic rollback documented [3] |
| Rollback | Symlink flip to a release on disk: one click on single-server projects, automatic on a failed health check | Yes, roll back to an earlier deployment [3][5] |
| Releases kept on disk | 5 by default, configurable | 4 by default, configurable [3] |
| Deploy time limit | 30 minutes (configurable when self-hosted) | 10 minutes; Envoyer's limits apply to Envoyer-linked sites [3] |
| Server provisioning, PHP, nginx, SSL | No | Yes [1] |
| Open source, self-hostable | Yes, Apache-2.0 | No, hosted service [1] |
Forge details checked on . Sources:
If you deploy one project to several servers, Forge alone won't do it with zero downtime today, by its own account. Your options are to keep Envoyer, or to move the deploy part somewhere else. symflip is one of those places. If you're weighing the two, read the honest comparison of symflip and Envoyer; it says where Envoyer still wins.
/home/forge/example.com-symflip.root to /home/forge/example.com-symflip/current/public. The new path sits next to the site folder, so edit the nginx config directly rather than the web directory field.current path.There's a full walkthrough in Migrating a multi-server Envoyer project to symflip. Setup notes for Laravel apps are on zero-downtime Laravel deployment.
Laravel, Laravel Forge and Laravel Envoyer are trademarks of their owner. Deployer is an independent open-source project. symflip is not affiliated with or endorsed by either. Competitor details are as published on the cited pages on and may have changed since.
Start free on one server, no card. Fleet deploys start on Team (€29/mo).