Development

New Laravel Forge

I've been using Laravel Forge for a couple of years now and it has always been an amazing product. It takes so much stress out of managing servers, believe me, I've been there and done it!

Laravel have given Laravel Forge a lot of love recently and introduced a whole host of new features.

I won't go into every single new feature, but I will highlight some of my favourites:

Revamped UI

I never thought there was anything wrong with the Forge UI, however there were definitely some things hidden away which required some extra clicks. The UI now reflects how the Laravel Cloud UI is, which is a welcomed addition as I love that UI.

Zero Downtime Deployments

This is huge for Laravel Forge. It means that if you were using Laravel Envoyer for zero downtime deployments, there's now no need. You can now use Forge for the same benefit and a lot more too! I'm interested to see if in the next couple of years, Laravel Envoyer is still around. Perhaps they'll migrate sites over to Laravel Forge instead?

Heartbeats

You can now set up heartbeat URLs for your scheduled tasks to ping, to alert Laravel Forge that are healthy! I previously used OhDear for this for one of my applications, but given that same application also uses Laravel Forge, I moved all of my heartbeats over to that. It also meant I could drop a couple of composer dependencies.

Command Palette

These are definitely becoming more popular and I'm glad Forge has introduced a command palette. Simply press ⌘K and do what you need to do!

I'm glad even with the launch of Laravel Cloud, that the Laravel team is still investing time making Laravel Forge as good as it can be. I can definitely see a world where both products exist. Laravel Envoyer though, I'm now not so sure!

Laravel Live UK 2026

Introduction I am writing this from the comfort of my garden, just a few days after returning from London for Laravel Live UK 2026. What an absolute blast it was. The energy this year was unmatched by any previous conference I’ve attended. It was wonderful to catch up with

Adding Eric the Red and Sentaur to the Herd

I got back from Laravel Live 2026 yesterday morning and was able to make a couple of additions to my Herd from the conference: * Eric the Red: This is the ElePHPant that is for Laravel Live Denmark this year. I was able to reach out to Kasper Hartwich who is

Adding Holly to the Herd

It wouldn't be a PHP Tek conference without a new ElePHPant. This year, the team released "Holly" as the ElePHPant for 2026. As usual these were available on the store, so I purchased a couple of them, one for the herd and one as trade fodder.

Using Cursor Security Agent

Last month, we received a report from a security researcher via our helpdesk that one of our apps was susceptible to XSS attacks. The report was on a weekend, but given the urgent nature (and the fact I wasn't doing much), I got to work on fixing it.