Managed Databases in Laravel Forge: Backups, Patches & Failovers

What if you never had to worry about your database again? With the Lava VPS, we made it so you don't have to bring your own server to Forge anymore. We give you one which is fully managed, but a database, this was still on you. Backups, patches, failovers, all on you. Now, with managed database, that's gone for you, too. Your servers managed, your database is managed, and it's all right inside Forge. Let me show you. I'm here inside level forge in my organization and let's create a new server and I'm going with a level VPS because yeah this way you don't have to manage your server. So this is an addition which we already brought in um some time ago for you. Okay, let's create a new one here. I'm going here with the region Frankfurt which is the closest to mine and let's go with the small one. It's an app server. All right, let's create this one now together. Here I'm going to download here my credentials and of course I will delete this after this demo. Okay. But before I'm going here to create a new site I'm going back to myization and we now have a new tab called resources. And here you can now directly inside forge create a new database cluster which is managed for you. So let's give this a name. By the way a database cluster think of it just as a group of database servers. For now, you can only select Postrest 17 and 18, but my SQL 8.4 is coming very soon. For the region, I'm always going with Frankfurt for my location here. Again, this is managed by us. And then you have a few options here to choose from. I'm going here with the smallest one, but depending on which you are choosing, you can also define the size. And here at the button, you will see that the cost increase um depending on the size, but I'm going with the smallest one here. and 10 GB is for sure enough for our demo. Then we have also high availability which also creates a second node for your database server. So this means if there's any failure we automatically switch to a different node so that your users or you don't recognize or don't see this database issue yourself. So this is something that you can pick and I think that's it for this here. Yeah, let's now create a new database cluster. And in the meantime, we're going back to the server here. And we're creating now a new site. And this will be a level application. And I've already prepared one which is called find someone like James. Yeah. So today everything is about James. So we don't need to connect it to a database because we want to then use the one from our database cluster. Here's our domain. I think the rest is looking fine. Okay. Let's create now this application here on label forge. Once we have our site, we're not going to deploy it right away. We're going first back to the organization and back to our cluster which is now finished. Again, here we get an overview of this database cluster and we are going to copy the details here which we then need for our site. But also interesting to know we can make this public if we want to. So this makes sense if you want to connect to the status base cluster from your local DP client or maybe you need to connect it from a different server then this is also possible here we can also create read replica. So this means if you want to have a replica only for reading and then another one for writing. This is what you can do here. If you create this then you need to make some changes in your configuration in your level application. So please make sure to check out the official level docs to learn more about this. And this is also the database name which was created and also the database user. Okay, what do we have as well? We have backups here. Daily backups. You can define a specific time if you want to. And if you have multiple ones, you can also then restore from a specific backups. If your cluster is already running a little bit longer than mine, then you will see here some graphs about the performance of your cluster. And then in settings you can for example update the information if you want to change to a different configuration for your cluster or also interesting you can define the upgrade window. Since we are managing this we are going to do upgrades as well. And here you can define when is the best time for your users or your use case this. And here we here's also where we can make this cluster public or not. Okay. I think we are good here. Let's go back to our site here, which is this one. And here we're going to settings and our environment information here. All right. And here for the database, we're going to change now a few things. So the host port, this one is was called default DB and username and password we also don't need. And the connection is now PGSQL. And I think we should be good to go now. Let's save this here. And something else we also need for this application here. I also have a cedar which you need for our demo application here. So let's also seat the database. All right, I think we're good to go now. Let's give this a try. And we're going to deploy now. And in just a bit, we're going to see if our database cluster is working, connected to application, and if we can access this demo application here. All right, let's give this a try. And yeah, let's make this a little bit bigger. Beautiful application here. So, me and James, we just came back from Laran EU and we Yeah, someone took that this wonderful photo. I think it was Dave or I think it was Wendell. And yeah, I use this here. Roses are red, violets are blue. Nobody looks at anyone the way James looks at you. [laughter] Oh my god, those are AI generated. Let's get Let's read one more. Love is temporary. James looking at Kristoff is forever. Okay, maybe just one more. If looks could dep one ship to production. [laughter] Oh my god, they're too good. Oh my god, love it. So James doesn't know about this yet, so please ping him and let him know about this. But yeah, now we have on forge not only our managed VPS servers for you, we also have managed databases. For now, we just have Postgress support, but very soon we will also have my SQL there for you as well. So please check it out. It's pretty cool. That's manage databases on forge. One dashboard, one bill, zero database admin headaches for you. Please check it out. Read the docs to learn more and see you the next time. Bye.