Downtime when deploying Laravel to Azure - laravel

Question

Im deploying a laravel site to a Azure Web App (running linux).
After upgrading to PHP 8 and nginx I experience a lot more downtime after deployment. Several minutes of nginx's Bad Gateway error.
In order to get laravel working with nginx I need to copy a nginx conf file from my project to nginx's config on the server.
Im running startup.sh after deploy that has the following commands as first lines:
cp /home/site/wwwroot/devops/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default;
service nginx reload
Content of my nginx.conf:
server {
# adjusted nginx.conf to make Laravel 8 apps with PHP 8.0 features runnable on Azure App Service
# #see https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/deployment
listen 8080;
listen [::]:8080;
root /home/site/wwwroot/public;
index index.php;
client_max_body_size 100M;
add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";
gzip on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_min_length 256;
gzip_types
application/atom+xml
application/geo+json
application/javascript
application/x-javascript
application/json
application/ld+json
application/manifest+json
application/rdf+xml
application/rss+xml
application/xhtml+xml
application/xml
font/eot
font/otf
font/ttf
image/svg+xml
text/css
text/javascript
text/plain
text/xml;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}
location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(|/.*)$;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY "";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_connect_timeout 300;
fastcgi_send_timeout 3600;
fastcgi_read_timeout 3600;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
}
}
I've also tried to use Azure Deployment Slots but the swap is happening before the Bad Gateway error has gone away.
Is there something else I can do to minimize the downtime/time for the project to get up and running again?

Answer 1

The "Bad Gateway" error suggests that Nginx is unable to connect to the backend, which in this case is PHP-FPM.
There are a few things you can try to minimize the downtime:
Increase the fastcgi_connect_timeout, fastcgi_send_timeout, and fastcgi_read_timeout values in your nginx configuration file. This will give PHP-FPM more time to start up and respond to requests.
Optimize your PHP code. Make sure your code is optimized for performance, as this will help reduce the time it takes for the site to start up.
Use Azure Deployment Slots for testing. Deployment slots allow you to test your code in a staging environment before deploying it to production. This can help reduce the risk of downtime in your production environment.
Try to make sure that your PHP-FPM and nginx services are always running, and that they are started automatically when the server boots up.
Try to reduce the number of restarts needed during deployment by using a deployment process that utilizes rolling upgrades.
Finally, you can try deploying a simple HTML file first, and then deploy the Laravel codebase. This will ensure that the web server and PHP are working before deploying the Laravel codebase.
Use trial and error to find out the best solution for your use case.