Opsworks is a convenient, powerful and free service provided by AWS to simplify the management of EC2 nodes.  The real power of the system is exposed through customizing various stages of the instance lifecycle by creating custom-tailored chef-solo recipes.

While Amazon provides a powerful deployment layer for PHP applications, it stops short once the PHP code has been checked out of git.  For Laravel or other composer apps, you’ll have to customize your deployment.  The most elegant and straightforward method is through custom deployment hooks.  Here’s how to build a before_migration.rb script to build a Laravel app …