Manage DigitalOcean Infrastructure With Ansible for Laravel and PHP Apps

Ahnii! This post walks through how to build an Ansible repo to manage a production DigitalOcean setup: two Ubuntu droplets, six Laravel apps, a couple of PHP framework sites, and a Go microservices platform. The goal is to codify everything that was previously managed via manual SSH, without replacing the Deployer workflow that already handles app releases. The Problem The setup worked. But it was held together by tribal knowledge. Adding a new site meant SSHing in, creating directories, writing a Caddyfile, setting up systemd services, creating a database, and hoping you remembered every step. Server config drifted over time. Nothing was reproducible. I needed a single source of truth for what the server should look like. What Ansible Manages (and What It Doesn't) This is the key design decision. Deployer already handles release deploys: building assets, uploading artifacts, symlinking releases, restarting services. It does that job well. Ansible handles everything else. Ansible owns: