Reflex for Laravel Developers — Forge-level deploys with self-healing infrastructure

TL;DR

Reflex gives Laravel developers everything Forge does for deployment — plus self-healing infrastructure, real-time observability, and an audit trail. Replace your Forge + monitoring + alerting stack with one platform that detects and repairs PHP-FPM crashes, OOM kills, and queue worker failures automatically.

The problem

• Forge deploys but does not heal — Laravel Forge handles provisioning and deployment well, but when PHP-FPM crashes at 2 AM or a queue worker silently dies, Forge has no idea. You find out from angry users, not from your tooling.
• Monitoring is a separate subscription — to get server health visibility you bolt on Datadog, New Relic, or Oh Dear alongside Forge. That is three dashboards, three subscriptions, and three mental models.
• No audit trail for operations — Forge logs deploys, but there is no unified timeline of "deploy happened, then CPU spiked, then PHP-FPM restarted, then the deploy was rolled back." Incident post-mortems require SSH archaeology.
• Queue workers fail silently — Horizon tells you about job failures, but the underlying Supervisor process dying or leaking memory is invisible. By the time jobs start timing out, the damage is done.
• OOM kills are invisible — the Linux OOM killer terminates your PHP worker, the process restarts in a degraded state, and nobody knows until response times spike. There is no alert, no log, no recovery.

How Reflex helps

• Pipeline replaces Forge deploys — Reflex Pipeline gives you Git-connected deployment with health gates, automatic rollback on failure, and zero-downtime promotion. It does what Forge does, with safety rails built in.
• Brain auto-repairs incidents — Reflex Brain monitors PHP-FPM process health, memory usage, and queue worker status. When a process crashes, Brain triggers the appropriate repair playbook — restart, clear OPcache, or rollback — before you are even aware.
• Playbooks for common Laravel failures — pre-built playbooks handle PHP-FPM restarts, OOM recovery, Supervisor queue worker resurrection, and failed migration rollback. Each runs idempotently and logs every step.
• Unified timeline — deploys, health checks, alerts, and playbook executions appear on a single timeline per server. Post-mortems take minutes, not hours.
• One tool replaces three — Reflex consolidates provisioning context, monitoring, alerting, and automated repair. Cancel Forge, cancel your monitoring tool, cancel your alerting tool.

Recommended plan

£29/server/month covers monitoring, repair playbooks, Pipeline, and configurable auto-repair on every connected host — ideal for a single Laravel app or a staging plus production pair.

Getting started

1. Connect your production server — install reflexd alongside your existing Forge setup. Reflex is additive — you can run both during evaluation.
2. Enable PHP-FPM, OOM, and queue worker playbooks — these three cover 80% of Laravel production incidents.
3. Trigger a test deploy via Pipeline — connect your Git repository, deploy to staging with health gates, and see the unified timeline populate in real time.