🚀 Arco v0.8.1: deploy Laravel to AWS serverless, and now try it locally first
What is Arco?
Arco is a free, open-source tool that takes your Laravel app and runs it on AWS Lambda Web Functions, AWS’s new way to run web apps without managing servers.
No EC2, no Docker images, no Kubernetes, no servers to patch. You pay for what your app actually uses, and it scales on its own, from zero visitors to thousands.
You install it with Composer and run one command:
composer require multiapi/arco-laravel laravel/octane
composer require --dev multiapi/arco
vendor/bin/arco init
vendor/bin/arco deploy
arco init looks at your app and asks what it needs. arco deploy packages it and puts it live on AWS with HTTPS. Under the hood it runs your app with FrankenPHP + Laravel Octane, so it boots once and stays fast between requests.
And it sets up the AWS pieces a real Laravel app uses, all from one arco.php file:
🌐 Custom domains with HTTPS certificates
⏰ The Laravel scheduler (your schedule:run tasks)
📬 Queues on SQS, each with its own worker
🪣 File storage on S3 (Storage::put() just works)
⚡ Cache on DynamoDB
🖥 arco command and arco tinker to run artisan in production
📜 arco logs to follow your logs live
🔐 Secrets stored in AWS SSM, never in your code
Arco keeps your data safe: removing a queue, bucket or table from arco.php never deletes it from AWS.
New in 0.8.1: try it on your laptop first
Floci is a local AWS emulator that already supports Lambda Web Functions. Point Arco at it with one variable and the full deploy runs on your machine, for free:
AWS_ENDPOINT_URL=http://localhost:4566 vendor/bin/arco deploy --env=local
🧪 The same deploy you’d do on AWS: web, custom domain, console, scheduler, queue workers, S3 storage, cache, logs.
🛡 Nothing can reach your real AWS account by accident: Arco tells you which endpoint it’s using.
And every change is now tested end to end
Most serious bugs only show up on a real deploy, so now every pull request does one. A sample Laravel app is deployed to Floci on GitHub’s ARM runners, and 8 checks must pass in under 3 minutes: the site, the custom domain through CloudFront, S3 storage, the cache, a queued job, the scheduler, artisan commands and logs. Then everything is cleaned up. Before each release, the same run goes against a real AWS account.
Open source helping open source 🙌
While building this we found two bugs in Floci: S3 rejected the ACL Laravel sends on every write, and CloudFront couldn’t reach a Web Function. We reported both with a reproduction, and the Floci team fixed both in about a day and a half. Those checks went from “skipped” to mandatory. Huge thanks to them.
Where we’re going: a 1.0 with a frozen config, tested on real AWS on every release, and real production traffic behind it.
MIT-licensed and free. If you run Laravel and want serverless on AWS without the complexity, give it a try and tell me what’s missing.
🔗 github.com/multi-api/arco
#Laravel #PHP #AWS #Serverless #OpenSource
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