Intro:

Deploying Laravel to Google Cloud can feel overwhelming at first — Dockerfiles, environment variables, queue handling, and cron jobs can quickly turn into a full DevOps project. But it doesn’t have to be this hard. In this post, I’ll walk you through a quick way to get your Laravel app running on Google Cloud Run, using simple steps you can follow today.

🛠️ What You’ll Need

• A Laravel project

• A Google Cloud account

• The gcloud CLI installed

• Docker installed locally

🚀 Step 1: Containerize Your Laravel App

You’ll need a Dockerfile at the root of your project:

FROM php:8.2-fpm

# Install dependencies
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    zip unzip curl git libpng-dev libonig-dev libxml2-dev libzip-dev \
    && docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql mbstring exif pcntl bcmath gd zip

# Set working directory
WORKDIR /var/www

# Copy and install composer
COPY . .
RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
RUN composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

# Set permissions
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

CMD ["php", "artisan", "serve", "--host=0.0.0.0", "--port=8080"]

⚙️ Step 2: Deploy to Cloud Run

In your terminal:

gcloud builds submit --tag

Then:

gcloud run deploy laravel-app \
  --image gcr.io/YOUR_PROJECT_ID/laravel-app \
  --platform managed \
  --region us-central1 \
  --allow-unauthenticated

🔐 Step 3: Configure Environment Variables

Use Google Secret Manager or pass vars in gcloud run deploy using:

--set-env-vars APP_KEY=your_app_key,APP_ENV

⏱️ Step 4: Schedule Cron Jobs (Optional)

Use Cloud Scheduler to call an authenticated route like:

Set up Laravel route to handle it.

📦 Bonus: Queue Workers with Pub/Sub

To support Laravel queues, configure Pub/Sub and a background worker service — or wait for LaraRun, which handles this automatically 😉

✅ Conclusion

Google Cloud Run is powerful, but a bit of a setup puzzle for Laravel devs. With tools like Docker, gcloud, and a bit of tweaking, you can go serverless in under 10 minutes. Or, you can skip the hassle altogether and join the LaraRun waitlist — we’re building this experience for you.