* API wrapper for many platforms
* SSH-key only access (password access disabled)
* Firewall management
* CRON management
* Sets up server dependencies and manages SSH keys
* Handles private networking between servers and firewalls to open ports between them
* Push to deploy (via Github)
* Handles spinning up more queue workers (beanstalkd + supervisord) by clicking a button
* Allows you to enter in "recipes" to run scripts (bash, php, others as well) on your servers
* Allows you to "archive" servers - which means Forge will "forget" your server,
eliminating the ability for Forge to access the server at all.
To re-enable the server from within Forge, you need to add in a
new ssh public key which Forge will re-generate for you.
Forge is not:
* Server management (if your server goes down, you contact the hosting, not Forge)
The need among PHP developers for a service that also does ongoing server management is why we built ServerPilot (https://serverpilot.io/).
While Forge is an advanced deployment tool similar to PuPHPet (https://puphpet.com/), ServerPilot is a modern alternative to cPanel for developers using their own servers.
The other piece of this is Laravel Homestead (https://github.com/laravel/homestead), a Vagrant box to make local development easier. Through Forge, you can deploy basically the same environment Homestead provides to any of the services. It's an easier way of keeping your dev and prod environments the same.
I really like the direction that Taylor has taken with Laravel in the past few months (Laracon). The creation of both Homestead and Forge will allow new users of the framework to quickly get started and removes many of the pain points that a lot of us have when starting out with web development.
If someone looking to start using a framework asked me which they should pick, I would recommend Laravel in a heartbeat. It has a friendly, active community, amazing resources to learn from (Laracasts and many books/articles) and now with Homestead and Forge it should allow a new user to get up and running in a matter of minutes.
