Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:

Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha

It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!

The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.

We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.

It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.

In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.

Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.

That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel/comments/1sn70d7/laravel_ad...

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chinathrow 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The fun fact about PHP is that, there is no Pipeline problem at all. You can serve your scripts the hell you like to do. You can scale as you wish, either with vertical or horizontal. You can use Apache, nginx, etc, no one cares.

	▲	aarondf an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think you're conflating a talent pipeline with ease of running PHP. Those are not the same thing at all
	▲	embedding-shape 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah, PHP is very simple to deploy, once you have either apache/nginx/caddy/$webserver and also PHP-cgi/PHP-fpm/$php-backend and also understand unix + permissions + files and a whole lot of other things. Or alternatively, learn how to use cPanel as a user, or worse, learn what (s)FTP is, or whatever the really low end web hosters use nowadays. I wish others learnt the "boring" way of managing your own servers, setting things up as they should, deploy processes and what not, but realistically, some people just want to run one command/click a button and have it updated, and probably that's for the better too. This Laravel Cloud thing are for those, not for people who want to/know how to run their own servers.

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kioleanu 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oooh it’s for the children!