Coming from Laravel Vapor
Laravel Vapor deploys Laravel as serverless functions on your AWS account, billed through Vapor on top of your AWS bill. Railyard runs the same app as a normal server process, at a flat price per team.
Why teams leave Laravel Vapor
Vapor is a clever way to run Laravel serverlessly on AWS Lambda. The friction shows up in cost and debugging: Vapor’s own subscription sits on top of your AWS bill, and cold starts, execution limits and a serverless mental model add friction that a normal server doesn’t have.
Railyard runs the same Laravel app as a long-lived process on a server in your own cloud account, at a flat price per team.
What comes with you
- Your Laravel repo, built from a Dockerfile or buildpacks.
- Your environment variables and secrets, previously set in Vapor’s dashboard or
vapor.yml. - Managed Postgres, MySQL and Redis map directly to Railyard addons.
- Laravel Horizon and queue workers run the same way on a Railyard worker process.
The move
- Attach a server: an existing one, or a new one Railyard provisions in your cloud account.
- Add your repo and Railyard detects Laravel automatically.
- Bring your config and attach the datastores your app expects.
- Deploy to a temporary URL. Run
php artisan migrateand verify. - Migrate data with a dump and restore into the managed addon.
- Move DNS. Vapor keeps serving until the cutover; there is no outage.
What’s different
A flat price per team instead of Vapor’s subscription on top of your AWS bill, and a normal server process instead of debugging cold starts and execution limits.