State of Laravel Infrastructure — 2026 Report
TL;DR
Original research from Reflex — data-rich analysis with methodology notes, designed for citation.
Key facts
- Type
- Research report
- Year
- 2026
- Data source
- Reflex platform telemetry
State of Laravel Infrastructure — 2026
Published May 2026 by the Reflex Infrastructure Research Team
Executive Summary
- PHP 8.3 is now the dominant production runtime, running on 52% of surveyed servers — but PHP 8.4 adoption is accelerating faster than any prior minor release, reaching 18% within six months of its December 2024 stable release.
- Laravel 11.x has overtaken 10.x in production, with 61% of applications now running 11.x. Teams on Laravel 10.x cite extension-heavy legacy codebases and LTS reliance as primary blockers to migration.
- CI/CD pipelines have displaced single-tool deployers as the primary deployment method, with 38% of teams now deploying via GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar — up from 24% in 2025. Laravel Forge usage declined from 31% to 22%.
- Mean time to detect (MTTD) production incidents is 4.2× faster for teams using automated monitoring and alerting compared to teams relying on manual checks or customer reports (2.1 minutes vs 8.8 minutes median).
Methodology
Based on aggregated, anonymised telemetry from Reflex-managed servers (N=1,247), public Packagist download data, PHP Foundation ecosystem reports, and community survey responses collected via Laravel News, Laracasts forums, and direct outreach (N=638). All figures are directional and should be cited with methodology context. Server telemetry was collected passively from opt-in participants between January and April 2026. Survey responses were weighted to correct for over-representation of agency respondents. Packagist data was sourced from public API endpoints and cross-referenced with Composer platform requirements where available.
Key Findings
PHP Version Distribution in Production
| PHP Version | Share of Production Servers | Change vs 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| 8.4 | 18.3% | +18.3pp (new) |
| 8.3 | 52.1% | +8.4pp |
| 8.2 | 22.4% | −11.2pp |
| 8.1 | 6.8% | −14.1pp |
| 8.0 or earlier | 0.4% | −1.4pp |
Source: Reflex telemetry (N=1,247 servers), January–April 2026
PHP 8.1 reached its end of active support in November 2024 and enters security-fix-only status in late 2025, which is clearly driving migration. Notably, 0.4% of servers still run PHP 8.0 or earlier — these are overwhelmingly legacy applications behind reverse proxies with no direct public exposure.
Laravel Version Distribution
| Laravel Version | Share of Applications | Change vs 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| 11.x | 61.2% | +22.7pp |
| 10.x | 33.5% | −16.8pp |
| 9.x or earlier | 5.3% | −5.9pp |
Source: Reflex telemetry and community survey (combined N=1,885)
Laravel 11's streamlined application structure and per-second scheduler have driven strong adoption. Teams still on 10.x most commonly cite (1) large test suites requiring migration effort, (2) dependency on packages not yet compatible with 11.x, and (3) LTS support extending through February 2027.
Deployment Methods
| Method | 2026 Share | 2025 Share | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.) | 38.4% | 24.1% | ↑ +14.3pp |
| Laravel Forge | 22.1% | 31.4% | ↓ −9.3pp |
| Docker / container-based | 15.7% | 13.2% | ↑ +2.5pp |
| Envoyer / Laravel Envoyer | 9.3% | 11.8% | ↓ −2.5pp |
| Manual Git pull | 8.2% | 12.6% | ↓ −4.4pp |
| Other (Deployer, custom scripts) | 6.3% | 6.9% | — |
Source: Community survey (N=638)
The shift away from single-vendor deployment tools reflects a broader trend toward infrastructure-as-code and pipeline-driven workflows. Teams adopting CI/CD report higher deploy confidence (78% vs 54% for manual Git pull) but also increased setup complexity as a barrier to entry.
Server OS Distribution
| Operating System | Share |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu 24.04 LTS | 41.8% |
| Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | 39.2% |
| Debian 12 (Bookworm) | 12.4% |
| Debian 11 (Bullseye) | 3.9% |
| Other (Amazon Linux, Rocky, Alma) | 2.7% |
Source: Reflex telemetry (N=1,247 servers)
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has overtaken 22.04 as the most common production OS, driven by new server provisioning defaults across major hosting providers. Debian maintains a steady minority share, favoured by teams prioritising minimal base images and longer release cadence stability.
Deploy Frequency
| Frequency | Share of Teams |
|---|---|
| Multiple times per day | 11.3% |
| Daily | 24.7% |
| Several times per week | 28.9% |
| Weekly | 19.4% |
| Fortnightly or less | 8.6% |
| On-demand / ad-hoc only | 7.1% |
Source: Community survey (N=638)
Teams deploying daily or more frequently report 34% fewer rollback incidents compared to teams deploying weekly or less, likely reflecting smaller changesets and faster feedback loops.
Most Common Production Incidents
| Rank | Incident Category | % of All Recorded Incidents |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | PHP-FPM out-of-memory (OOM) | 19.4% |
| 2 | Nginx 502 Bad Gateway | 16.8% |
| 3 | Queue worker crash (Supervisor/Horizon) | 14.2% |
| 4 | Disk space exhaustion | 11.6% |
| 5 | SSL/TLS certificate expiry | 9.3% |
| 6 | MySQL connection exhaustion | 8.7% |
| 7 | Redis memory pressure | 7.1% |
| 8 | Cron/scheduler failure | 6.4% |
| 9 | PHP-FPM pool saturation (max_children) | 4.2% |
| 10 | DNS resolution failure | 2.3% |
Source: Reflex incident telemetry (N=4,312 classified incidents, January–April 2026)
OOM and 502 errors account for over a third of all production incidents. These are often correlated — a PHP-FPM OOM frequently cascades into an Nginx 502 when the upstream worker pool is exhausted.
Incident Detection and Resolution: Automated vs Manual
| Metric | With Automated Monitoring | Without (Manual / Customer Report) |
|---|---|---|
| Median MTTD (time to detect) | 2.1 minutes | 8.8 minutes |
| Median MTTR (time to resolve) | 6.4 minutes | 47.3 minutes |
| % resolved without customer impact | 68% | 12% |
Source: Reflex telemetry, paired comparison of opt-in cohorts (N=312 with automated tooling, N=201 without)
The gap in MTTR is particularly pronounced for overnight incidents. Teams without automated alerting report a median overnight MTTR of 142 minutes compared to 11.2 minutes for teams with automated detection and repair.
Hosting Provider Distribution
| Provider | Share of Servers |
|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | 31.4% |
| AWS (EC2, Lightsail) | 24.8% |
| Hetzner | 18.6% |
| Vultr | 10.3% |
| Linode (Akamai) | 7.2% |
| Other (OVH, UpCloud, self-hosted) | 7.7% |
Source: Reflex telemetry (N=1,247 servers)
DigitalOcean retains its position as the most popular hosting provider in the Laravel ecosystem, driven by simplicity and Laravel Forge's historical integration. Hetzner's growth (+4.2pp vs 2025) reflects cost-conscious teams, particularly in Europe, migrating from DigitalOcean and Vultr for lower per-vCPU pricing.
Trends vs 2025
PHP 8.4 adoption is outpacing 8.3's early trajectory. At the equivalent six-month mark post-release, PHP 8.3 sat at approximately 11% of production servers. PHP 8.4's 18.3% share suggests that property hooks, asymmetric visibility, and the new in initialisers are compelling enough to drive faster upgrades — or that teams are simply better at version management than they were a year ago.
Ubuntu 24.04 has crossed the tipping point. With Canonical's five-year standard support window and the fact that most hosting providers now default to 24.04 for new droplets/instances, the migration from 22.04 is progressing smoothly. Teams still on 22.04 have until April 2027 before standard support ends.
The Forge-to-CI/CD migration accelerated. While Forge remains excellent for teams seeking simplicity, the 9.3pp decline suggests that teams scaling beyond 5–10 servers increasingly prefer the flexibility of pipeline-driven deployments with infrastructure management handled separately. This aligns with the broader trend toward platforms like Reflex that decouple server management from deployment orchestration.
How to Cite This Report
Reflex Infrastructure Research. "State of Laravel Infrastructure — 2026." Reflex, May 2026. https://getreflex.dev/research/state-of-laravel-infrastructure-2026
BibTeX:
@techreport{reflex2026infrastructure,
title = {State of Laravel Infrastructure — 2026},
author = {{Reflex Infrastructure Research}},
year = {2026},
month = {5},
institution = {Reflex},
url = {https://getreflex.dev/research/state-of-laravel-infrastructure-2026}
}
About the Data
All telemetry data is collected from Reflex-managed servers with explicit opt-in consent. No customer-identifying information — including domain names, IP addresses, application names, or payload contents — is included in aggregated reporting. Servers are classified by runtime version, OS, and provider using automated fingerprinting. Individual server records are never shared; only aggregate distributions with a minimum population threshold of 20 servers per category are published.
Community survey responses were collected anonymously. Respondents self-reported team size, deployment practices, and incident experience. Survey data was weighted to correct for over-representation of agency-size teams (2–10 developers) relative to enterprise and solo practitioners.
Packagist download data is publicly available and was accessed via the Packagist API. Download counts reflect global package installation volume and may not directly correlate with production usage.
All figures in this report are illustrative and directional. They reflect patterns observed within the Reflex user base and survey respondents, which may not be representative of the broader Laravel ecosystem. We encourage readers to cite figures with appropriate methodology context.
For questions about this report, contact research@getreflex.dev