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What I Learned Deploying a T3 stack with Laravel Forge

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What I Learned While Deploying a T3 stack app called KidCheckIn with Laravel Forge

Today was a huge milestone in building KidCheckIn. I deployed the site through Laravel Forge. It wasn’t smooth, but it was solid. I hit a bunch of errors, rolled up my sleeves, and pushed through until everything worked the way it was supposed to. Honestly, I learned more from today’s struggles than from weeks of tutorials.

Here’s what went down and what I picked up along the way.

The Build Process Taught Me to Respect Linting

My first blocker was a wave of lint errors that hit when I tried to deploy. I had skipped over them before, thinking they were just minor style things. But today, I realized that linting isn’t just about formatting, it can break your build if you ignore it.

I fixed each lint issue one by one, ran pnpm lint, fixed what was necessary, and then built locally with:

pnpm build

Lesson learned: Don’t ignore linting, especially when you’re deploying to production.

Writing a Deployment Script for Forge

To make the whole deployment process smoother, I wrote a custom Bash deployment script for Forge. Here’s a snapshot of what it does:

#!/bin/bash

cd /home/forge/kidcheckin.com
git pull origin t3-kidcheckin

export NODE_ENV=production
pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm drizzle-kit push

pm2 delete kidcheckin || true
pm2 start "pnpm start" --name kidcheckin --watch

pm2 save

This script pulls the latest code, installs dependencies, builds the app, pushes Drizzle migrations, and restarts the app with PM2. Now I can hit deploy in Forge or push to GitHub and let this script handle the rest.

Nginx and SSH: Facing the Scary Stuff

Nginx config used to feel like a black box, but I got hands-on today and it finally clicked. I made sure my site was pointing to the right .output directory from the Next.js build:

nginx
Copy
Editlocation / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}

I also SSH’d into the Forge server, set up PostgreSQL, and created the database .

Once that was done, I connected it all through .env and tested locally before going live.

Quick Deploy + GitHub Auto-Deploy

One of the coolest things I set up today was Quick Deploy through Forge. Once the deployment script was working, I linked it to my GitHub repo and enabled automatic deployment from the t3-kidcheckin branch. Now whenever I push changes, Forge picks it up and runs the whole process for me.

I tested it by making a small update, pushing to GitHub, and boom — it deployed live without me touching a thing.


Wrapping It Up

Today stretched me. I got frustrated, had to Google way too many things, and felt like I broke the site more than I fixed it. But by the end, I had:

  • Fixed my build process
  • Written a working deployment script
  • Configured Nginx with confidence
  • Set up and connected PostgreSQL on a live server
  • Enabled auto-deploy from GitHub

It’s wild how much you can learn from just sitting down and doing the thing. KidCheckIn is one step closer to being ready for Sundays.

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