Before starting, you should have set up a new site in your hosting manager and ideally have an empty database. You may also apply these instructions to an existing website, including legacy versions of October CMS, however, please make sure you have taken a complete backup in case something goes wrong.

For safety, the deploy plugin will never delete files. It will overwrite and create new files only. If you need to delete something, you should do it directly on the server.

Control Panel Setup

After installing this plugin, navigate to the Settings > Deploy in your October CMS control panel and click Create Server.

1. Enter the web address for your site (eg: https://mycpanelwebsite.tld/)
2. Generate a new RSA private key, or enter an existing one to set up an existing server
3. Download the Beacon ZIP files

Beacon Deployment

In your Beacon ZIP file, you should notice the following files:

• index.php
• bootstrap/app.php
• bootstrap/autoload.php
• bootstrap/beacon.php

You can upload these files anywhere and they will become a target for deployment of October CMS. You can use FTP or the file manager in your hosting control panel.

Important: The directory where the files are uploaded must be writable by your web server (eg: permission 755 for apache).

Run Your First Deployment

Once you have the Beacon installed remotely and the server set up locally. It's time to perform your first deployment.

Troubleshooting Beacon the Response

Sometimes you may see an error that a valid response from a beacon was not found.

The first thing to try is the "Check Beacon" link to make sure the beacon is Active, if it says Unreachable, try downloading the beacon files and uploading them again to your server.

You can perform more advanced troubleshooting by capturing the raw response from the server or beacon. To capture the raw response from the beacon, do the following.

1. Add ?debug=1 to the end of the URL in the backend.
2. Click Check Beacon or perform the deployment action again.
3. Check the log file in storage/logs to see what the server is responding with.

This should hopefully provide some insight in to why the response was not accepted.

Console Commands

The deploy plugin provides several console commands that can be used as an alternative to the backend interface. These are useful for automating deployments or when building large archives (such as vendor packages) that may time out in the browser.

Listing Servers

Use the deploy:list command to see all configured deployment servers.

php artisan deploy:list

Testing Beacon Connectivity

Use the deploy:test command to check if a server's beacon is reachable. The server can be specified by name or ID.

php artisan deploy:test "My Server"
php artisan deploy:test 1

Building Archives

Use the deploy:build command to build deployment archives locally without transmitting them. This is useful for verifying that large archives (especially vendor packages) can be built successfully.

php artisan deploy:build --vendor
php artisan deploy:build --core --config
php artisan deploy:build --all
php artisan deploy:build --plugins=Acme.Blog --plugins=Acme.Pages
php artisan deploy:build --themes=demo
php artisan deploy:build --all --output=/path/to/output

Deploying to a Server

Use the deploy:server command to perform a full deployment to a remote server. This mirrors the deployment workflow available in the backend interface.

php artisan deploy:server "My Server" --all
php artisan deploy:server "My Server" --core --config
php artisan deploy:server "My Server" --plugins=Acme.Blog --themes=demo
php artisan deploy:server "My Server" --all --force

If no options are specified, the command will prompt interactively for what to deploy.

php artisan deploy:server "My Server"

Using .deployignore to Ignore Files

There are times when you don't want specific files to be deployed, such as the node_modules directory used in plugins and themes. This is possible by creating a .deployignore file in the base directory of your plugin or theme. This file behaves the same as .gitignore file where you can configure Git to ignore files you don't want to check in.

The following .deployignore file will exclude the node_modules directory. This is also the default contents if no file exists.

node_modules/

The file must be located at the base directory of the theme or plugin. For example:

• themes/demo/.deployignore
• plugins/acme/demo/.deployignore