How to Host Laravel Applications on Square Cloud

Hosting Laravel on Square Cloud goes beyond simply uploading code. To ensure your application handles a high volume of requests with low latency, our environment offers native support for Swoole via Laravel Octane, transforming how PHP processes information.

1. The Swoole Advantage

Traditionally, PHP starts a new process for each request, creating memory and CPU overhead. By using Swoole in our environment, the application remains in memory (bootstrapped), ready to respond instantly.

This results in:

• Request responses in milliseconds.
• Lower resource consumption of your plan.
• Native capability to handle WebSockets and asynchronous tasks.

2. The Ideal Initialization Script

On Square Cloud, you can automate the entire preparation and initialization process of the application in a single command line. This ensures that with every restart or commit, your environment is perfectly synchronized.

Start Command Example:

php artisan optimize && php artisan migrate --force && php artisan octane:start --host=0.0.0.0 --port=80 --workers=4 --task-workers=8 --server=swoole

What does this command do?

1. php artisan optimize: Clears and generates route and configuration caches.
2. php artisan migrate --force: Runs your database migrations automatically.
3. php artisan octane:start: Starts the high-performance server on port 80, utilizing 4 processing workers and 8 workers for heavy tasks.

Before uploading: run npm run build on your machine and ship the public/build folder in the ZIP (the PHP runtime does not install npm packages), and add Octane to the project with composer require laravel/octane. Square Cloud runs composer install on its own before each start, so send composer.json and composer.lock and leave it out of the command.

3. Performance Tips

• Task Workers: In the start command, the --task-workers=8 parameter allows you to send heavy tasks (like sending emails or processing images) to the background without blocking the main user response.
• Symbolic Storage: Remember to run the php artisan storage:link command if you need to serve public files from the storage folder. You can add this to your start script.
• Caching with Redis: Use a Redis instance on Square Cloud to manage Laravel sessions and cache for even more extreme performance.

Updated on: 10/04/2026