Deploy Laravel on Oracle Cloud's free tier

At a glance

Running Laravel on Ampere ARM

The official PHP images are multi-arch. OPcache plus config/route caching on an Ampere core gives response times most shared hosts cannot match.

Steps

1. Cache config, routes and views at build. It removes filesystem work from every request.
2. Run the queue worker as its own container. `php artisan queue:work` needs a long-lived process — exactly what a VM gives you.

   php artisan queue:work --tries=3 --timeout=90

3. Add the scheduler. A cron container running `php artisan schedule:run` every minute replaces platform cron add-ons.

Dockerfile for Laravel on ARM64

FROM php:8.3-fpm-alpine
WORKDIR /var/www
RUN apk add --no-cache nginx supervisor libpng-dev icu-dev \
 && docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql opcache intl gd
COPY --from=composer:2 /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer
COPY composer.json composer.lock ./
RUN composer install --no-dev --no-scripts --optimize-autoloader
COPY . .
RUN php artisan config:cache && php artisan route:cache && php artisan view:cache
EXPOSE 9000
CMD ["php-fpm"]

Need one tailored to your repository? The free Dockerfile generator writes an ARM-ready multi-stage build for you.

Common mistakes

• Storage permissions: storage/ and bootstrap/cache must be writable by the php-fpm user.
• APP_KEY missing: Encrypted cookies and sessions fail immediately without it.
• Cached config with wrong env: Re-run config:cache after changing env vars, or the old values persist.

Related reading

• /guides/self-host-docker
• /tools/dockerfile-generator
• /for/non-technical-founders
• All deployment guides