Cookbook

Common tasks and solutions for managing your Forge server.

AWS Provisioned Servers Are Disappearing

To ensure Forge works correctly with AWS, please review these requirements.

DigitalOcean Droplet Limit Exceeded

This error is returned by DigitalOcean when you have reached a limit on how many droplets you can create. You can ask DigitalOcean to increase your droplet limit by contacting their support. Once they have increased your limit, you may create servers in Forge.

Expanding Server Disk Space

When you increase your server’s disk size through your VPS provider, the additional space is not automatically available to your Ubuntu filesystem. You will need to expand the operating system’s filesystem to use the newly allocated space.

We strongly recommend creating a backup or snapshot of your server through your VPS provider before proceeding with disk expansion operations. While these commands are generally safe, disk operations carry inherent risks.

Checking Current Disk Usage

First, check your current disk usage to identify which partition needs expansion:

df -h

This command will show you all mounted filesystems and their usage. Look for the partition that’s running low on space (typically /).

Expanding the Filesystem

Most Forge servers use standard partitions without LVM (Logical Volume Manager). If your system uses LVM, the disk expansion process is different and requires additional steps using the pvresize and lvextend commands.

For standard, non-LVM systems, follow these steps:

1. First, check your partition table:

   sudo fdisk -l
   

2. If the partition needs to be expanded, use the growpart command:

   # Install growpart if it is not available...
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y cloud-guest-utils
   
   # Grow the partition...
   sudo growpart /dev/vda1  # Replace with your actual device and partition number (e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/xvda1)
   

3. Resize the filesystem:

   # For ext4 filesystems...
   sudo resize2fs /dev/vda1  # Replace with your actual device (e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/xvda1)
   
   # For XFS filesystems...
   sudo xfs_growfs /
   

Verifying the Expansion

After completing the expansion, verify that the additional space is available:

df -h

The filesystem should now show the increased capacity.

Troubleshooting

“No space left on device” Error

If you encounter an error like mkdir: cannot create directory '/tmp/growpart.xxxx': No space left on device, your root filesystem is completely full, preventing even basic commands from running. You will need to free up some temporary space first:

# Clear apt cache...
sudo apt-get clean

# Clear journal logs (keep only last 50M)...
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=50M

# Remove old snap versions...
sudo sh -c 'snap list --all | grep disabled | awk "{print \$1, \$3}" | while read name rev; do snap remove "$name" --revision="$rev"; done'

# Check if you now have space...
df -h /

Once you created free space on the disk, you can proceed with the disk expansion steps above.

Consider setting up disk usage monitoring to receive alerts before your disk space runs critically low, giving you time to expand the disk proactively.

Operating System Release Upgrades

When connecting to your server via SSH, you may encounter messages like New release '24.04.1 LTS' available or be instructed to run do-release-upgrade. However, we strongly advise against performing operating system release upgrades on Forge-managed servers.

Upgrading your server’s operating system version can break Forge’s ability to manage your server and may cause application downtime.

During initial provisioning, Forge configures your Ubuntu server with specific settings, services, and applications that are tailored to work seamlessly together. A release upgrade can:

• Overwrite critical configuration files
• Change system service behaviors
• Break compatibility with installed PHP versions, databases, and other services
• Prevent Forge from properly managing your server
• Cause unexpected application errors or downtime

Recommended Approach

Instead of upgrading, we recommend provisioning a new server with your desired Ubuntu version through Forge, then migrating your sites to the new server. This approach ensures full Forge compatibility and reduces the risk of unexpected issues that can arise from in-place upgrades.

For teams that prefer a fully managed solution, Laravel Cloud eliminates operating system concerns entirely. While Forge provides maximum control and flexibility over your infrastructure, Laravel Cloud’s fully-managed approach means you never need to think about server maintenance or OS versions.

Restarting PHP FPM

When configuring your server, Forge configures FPM so that it can be restarted without using your server’s “sudo” password. To do so, you should issue the following command. Of course, you should adjust the PHP version to match the version of PHP installed on your machine:

touch /tmp/fpmlock 2>/dev/null || true
( flock -w 10 9 || exit 1
    echo 'Restarting FPM...'; sudo -S service $FORGE_PHP_FPM reload ) 9</tmp/fpmlock

flock is used to prevent concurrent php-fpm reloads. Without a lock, simultaneous restart attempts could lead to race conditions, brief service interruptions, or inconsistent process states.

Resetting The forge User Sudo Password

Forge does not store your server’s forge user sudo password and is therefore unable to reset it for you. To reset the forge user sudo password, you’ll need to contact your server provider and regain SSH access to your server as the root user.

Once you are connected to your server as the root user, you should run the passwd forge command to redefine the forge user sudo password.

Digital Ocean

If your servers are managed by DigitalOcean, the following steps should assist you in resetting the forge user’s sudo password using Digital Ocean’s dashboard.

1. First, on DigitalOcean’s dashboard, click on the server name. Then, within the “Access” tab, click on “Reset Root Password”. Usually, this operation restarts the server and sends the new root user’s sudo password to your DigitalOcean account’s associated email address.

2. Next, still on the “Access” tab, click on “Launch Droplet Console” to gain access to your server terminal as the root user. During this step, you will be asked to redefine the root user’s sudo password.

3. Finally, execute the passwd forge terminal command as the root user to redefine the forge user’s sudo password.

Server Disconnected

There are several reasons why your server may have a “disconnected” status. We encourage you to check these common solutions before contacting support:

• Verify that the server is powered on via your server provider’s dashboard. If the server is powered off, you should restart it using your provider’s dashboard.
• Verify that the public IP address of the server is known to Forge (the public IP address may change between reboots of the actual VPS).
• Verify that the Forge generated public key for the server is included in the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and /home/forge/.ssh/authorized_keys files. This key is available via the “Settings” tab of your server’s Forge management panel.
• If your server is behind a firewall, make sure you have allowed Forge’s IP addresses to access the server.
• If you removed Port 22 from the server’s firewall rules, you will need to contact your server provider and ask them to restore the rule. Removing this rule prevents Forge from accessing your server via SSH.
• Remove any private keys or other lines that do not contain a valid public key from the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and /home/forge/.ssh/authorized_keys files.

If you are still experiencing connectivity issues, you should also verify that the permissions and ownership of the following directories and files are correct:

# Fixes the "root" user (run as root)

chown root:root /root
chown -R root:root /root/.ssh
chmod 700 /root/.ssh
chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys

# Fixes the "forge" user

chown forge:forge /home/forge
chown -R forge:forge /home/forge/.ssh
chmod 700 /home/forge/.ssh
chmod 600 /home/forge/.ssh/authorized_keys

If, after trying all of the above solutions, Forge is still unable to connect to your server but you can still SSH to the server, please run the following command as the root user and share the output with Forge support:

grep 'sshd' /var/log/auth.log | tail -n 10

If Forge is not able to connect to your server, you will not be able to manage it through the Forge dashboard until connectivity is restored.

”Too Many Open Files” Error

If you are receiving an error stating that your server has “too many open files”, you likely need to increase the maximum amount of file descriptors that your operating system is configured to allow at a given time. This may be particularly true if your server will be handling a very large number of incoming web requests.

First, ensure the maximum number of “open files” is correctly configured based on the size of your server. Usually, the maximum number of open files allowed by the operating system should be about 100 files for every 1MB of RAM. For example, if your server has 4GB memory, the maximum number of open files can safely be set to 409600.

You can determine how many files your operating system currently allows to be opened at once by running the sysctl fs.file-max command. You can configure the existing setting by adding or modifying the following line in /etc/sysctl.conf:

fs.file-max = LIMIT_HERE

While the instructions above set the maximum number of “open files” system-wide, you also need to specify these limits for each server user by editing the /etc/security/limits.conf file and adding the following lines:

root soft nofile LIMIT_HERE
root hard nofile LIMIT_HERE
forge soft nofile LIMIT_HERE
forge hard nofile LIMIT_HERE

Of course, if your server contains additional users due to the use of “site isolation”, those users also need to be added to the /etc/security/limits.conf file:

isolated-user soft nofile LIMIT_HERE
isolated-user hard nofile LIMIT_HERE

Additionally, if the “too many open files” error was triggered by an Nginx process (very common on load balancers at scale), you will need to also add the nginx user to /etc/security/limits.conf:

nginx soft nofile LIMIT_HERE
nginx hard nofile LIMIT_HERE

And, add the following directive to your server’s /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file:

worker_rlimit_nofile LIMIT_HERE;

You should restart the Nginx service once this directive has been added to your Nginx configuration file:

service nginx restart

Upgrading Composer

The latest version of Composer is installed by Forge when a new server is provisioned. However, as your server ages, you may wish to upgrade the installed version of Composer. You may do so using the following command:

composer self-update --2

This will instruct Composer to update itself and specifically select version 2. If your application is not compatible with Composer 2, you can roll back to Composer 1 at any time:

composer self-update --1

Servers are provisioned with a Scheduled job that updates Composer. You should delete and recreate the existing job via the server’s “Scheduled Jobs” tab after upgrading Composer.

Upgrading Meilisearch

If you would like to install the latest Meilisearch binaries on your server, please follow the official Meilisearch upgrade guide.

On most Forge servers, the Meilisearch binary is installed at /usr/local/bin/meilisearch and the database is stored at /var/lib/meilisearch.

Upgrading Nginx

The latest version of Nginx is installed by Forge when a new server is provisioned. However, as your server ages, you may wish to upgrade the installed version of Nginx. You may do so using the following commands:

sudo apt-get install -y --only-upgrade nginx
sudo nginx -v
sudo service nginx restart

You should upgrade the Nginx version on your server at your own risk. Upgrading the version of Nginx installed on your server may cause downtime or conflict with other installed software.

Upgrading Node.js

The latest LTS version of Node.js is installed by Forge when it is provisioning a new server. However, as your server ages, you may wish to upgrade the version of Node.js:

sudo apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change && sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource-repo.gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/nodesource.gpg
NODE_MAJOR=22
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/nodesource.gpg] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_$NODE_MAJOR.x nodistro main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
sudo apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change && sudo apt-get install nodejs -y

Node.js version information

Upgrading npm

The latest version of npm is installed by Forge when provisioning new servers. However, you may upgrade the installed version of npm using the following commands:

sudo npm install npm@latest -g