Part 9 of the CI/CD for Laravel Developers series.
Migrate Laravel 13 + Next.js to zero-downtime VPS releases in under 20 minutes — no downtime during the migration itself. This post is part of the DevOps series on deploying Laravel and Next.js with GitHub Actions. Most tutorials assume you're starting from scratch. This one assumes you already have a live project at /var/www/your-project and want to move it to the releases/symlink pattern so GitHub Actions can deploy atomically.
We'll migrate a monorepo with a Laravel 13 API and a Next.js 16 frontend running under Nginx and PM2 on a single Ubuntu VPS. The same steps apply to any project layout with minor path adjustments.
What Is the Releases Pattern and Why You Need It on VPS
In a normal VPS setup, your deployment overwrites files in the live directory. During that window — while composer install or npm ci runs — your app is in a broken state. Requests hit a mix of old PHP files and new ones, or a half-installed vendor directory.
