Step 13 — Deploy

php pionia serve is for learning. Real customers need a process that stays up, uses production secrets, and runs your migrations on a real database.

What does “deploy” mean? (in general)#

Deploy = put your app on a machine (or container) the public can reach, with:

1. Code installed (composer install --no-dev)
2. Config for that environment (.env with real JWT_SECRET, DB password)
3. Schema applied (migrate)
4. A long-running HTTP server (PHP-FPM behind Nginx, or RoadRunner workers)

Local serve starts a tiny built-in server and exits when you close the terminal. Production uses a worker or FPM pool that handles many requests.

RoadRunner is optional but nice for Pionia: boot PHP once, handle many HTTP requests in a loop (faster than starting PHP from scratch each time).

What you will learn#

• A minimal production checklist for Pionia Shop
• Where to put secrets
• How to smoke-test with ping

Minimal checklist#

composer install --no-dev -o
php pionia migrate
php pionia optimize --production
php pionia runserver --detach
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/ping

Put real JWT_SECRET and database credentials in the server .env — never in git.

If you built a frontend (Step 12), run frontend:build on the server (or in CI) so public/ has the storefront assets.

Guides: RoadRunner and Production performance.

Common mistakes#

• Shipping with DEBUG=true and a toy JWT secret
• Forgetting migrate on the new host — empty database, confusing 500s
• Pointing DNS at the machine but never opening the firewall / reverse proxy to the app port