Taylor Otwell originally created Laravel in 2011 to help himself prototype startup ideas more quickly. At the time, he was working with enterprise .NET and COBOL systems and wanted a simpler way to build modern web applications.

“I knew PHP was easy to write and easy to host, so I started building my own framework in PHP to let me build startup ideas,” says founder and CEO, Taylor Otwell.

What began as a personal tool quickly evolved into a full-stack framework that now includes authentication, database abstraction, encryption, job queues, and task scheduling. Basically, everything developers need to build modern web applications end-to-end.

Over time, Laravel took inspiration from frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django, combining proven patterns with a focus on elegance and developer experience. That same philosophy now shapes how Laravel approaches AI. Because its conventions give coding agents a clear, predictable target, Laravel has built a growing set of AI-native tools on top of them, packages that let developers build with AI and weave language models into their apps without abandoning the patterns they already know.

This commitment to the developer experience naturally led to a long-term infrastructure partnership with DigitalOcean. Today, DigitalOcean powers Laravel’s deployment platform and its broader ecosystem.

Powering Laravel VPS with DigitalOcean

As Laravel grew, so did the need for robust, developer-friendly infrastructure to support its ecosystem. This is especially true of its managed deployment platform, Laravel Forge. Laravel Forge was launched in 2014 to make it easier for developers to provision servers and deploy Laravel applications. From day one, Forge integrated with DigitalOcean, allowing users to connect their DigitalOcean accounts by pasting an API key and spin up servers in minutes.

“DigitalOcean was the first infrastructure partner we ever integrated with on Forge,” Otwell says. “The API was very well documented. It was easy to use. It worked as expected. There weren’t pages and pages of confusing stuff to dig through.”

Over time, Laravel users have provisioned more than 100,000 DigitalOcean-powered servers through Forge. That long-standing integration laid the foundation for Laravel’s next evolution: Laravel VPS.

Laravel VPS is a fully managed, Laravel-optimized virtual private server offering built directly into Forge. Instead of requiring developers to bring their own cloud account and manage external billing, Laravel VPS allows users to sign up, click “Create Server,” and immediately receive a production-ready environment—no third-party configuration required.

Behind the scenes, Laravel VPS is powered entirely by DigitalOcean infrastructure. Laravel maintains pools of pre-warmed DigitalOcean Droplet® instances that are already configured and optimized for running Laravel applications.

“Our North Star is how quickly we can get people from sign-up to shipping an app to production,” Otwell says. “Now we can hand you a DigitalOcean-powered server in seconds. Before, it might have taken 15 or 20 minutes. We’ve really streamlined the entire onboarding process.”

The result is an experience that feels native to Laravel. Developers don’t have to think about infrastructure setup, API keys, or manual server preparation. They simply start building and shipping.

A Shared Vision for Developers

For Laravel, DigitalOcean’s appeal goes beyond infrastructure performance. The two companies share a similar approach to developer experience: making powerful capabilities accessible at every stage of growth.

“Laravel tries to scale with you from a single developer with an idea all the way up to an enterprise-scale company,” Otwell explains. “DigitalOcean works very similarly. It’s easy to spin up one Droplet, but you can also use Managed Databases, Managed Kubernetes, Load Balancers, and scale to whatever level you want.”

Because of that long-standing history together, the choice was simple when it came time to launch their newest innovation.

“When we were thinking about partners for Laravel VPS, DigitalOcean is basically the first partner that came to mind because we’ve been working with DigitalOcean the longest, we know that the developer experience is good, and we know we can get in touch with the team.”

The partnership is valued not only by leadership but by the broader Laravel org. “We hear nothing but positive things from our developers and from our staff as we integrate with DigitalOcean,” Otwell says. “They’re easy to get in touch with, supportive, and it feels like they’re on our team—cheering us on and wanting to see us grow.”

Accelerating the Future with AI

As Laravel and DigitalOcean continue to remove friction from server infrastructure, Laravel is also looking toward the next major paradigm shift in development: artificial intelligence. To help enable developers to build at the speed of thought, Laravel has fully embraced AI-driven workflows by releasing a suite of powerful, ecosystem-native tools:

• Laravel AI SDK: A unified toolset that lets developers integrate advanced large language models directly into their applications using expressive, native Laravel paradigms.

• Laravel MCP: An implementation of the Model Context Protocol, allowing local and remote AI models to securely interface with development tools and better understand application structure.

• Laravel Boost: An open-source package meticulously engineered to accelerate development cycles and bridge the gap between human intent and written code.

When asked how AI coding agents are changing the way people build within the framework day-to-day, the Laravel team highlighted how Laravel’s architectural philosophy gives it a distinct advantage:

“AI is making it easier than ever for people to go from idea to production. Laravel’s opinionated structure is great for AI agents because they have a very specific way to write Laravel code. We’ve created open source packages like Laravel Boost to accelerate Laravel development, whether you’re a vet or a newbie to the framework.”

The team gave developers a firsthand look at this evolution earlier this year during a live demo of how these tools mesh with modern developer environments:

With AI-friendly code architecture, Laravel is helping to ensure that the pipeline from an initial idea to a live production application is faster—and more accessible—than ever before.

What’s Next: Deeper Infrastructure Integration

Looking ahead, Laravel plans to deepen its integration with DigitalOcean by exposing more managed services directly through Forge. This includes managed databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL), caching, and load balancers—all curated and optimized for Laravel applications.

“We want to bring these tools into Forge in a really accessible way,” Otwell says. “One click, and it just works with your Laravel application. We use these services ourselves to run Forge, so it’s exciting to offer them to customers too.”

With DigitalOcean as a key infrastructure partner, Laravel continues to remove barriers to production and helps thousands of developers move from “Hello World” to real-world impact in minutes, not hours.