In my recent PHP projects, I tend to use Symfony 4, and Webpack Encore to build my assets. I find it to be a strong set of base tools for PHP apps.

Webpack is a quite convenient way to build assets, widely used in the NodeJS world and for static sites, eventhough it can be slow sometimes. Webpack Encore is a wrapper around Webpack that simplifies its API, a bit like Webpacker.

Deployer is an atomic deployment tool that is quite easy to use, robust, and highly configurable.

But fiddling with the conf to have something ready for Symfony 4 + Webpack took me a bit of time, so here is my deploy.php file with comments inside so you can hopefully benefit from it. There are two options for asset build : either local or remote. I prefer local since it's faster, and you don't need to have your building toolchain on the production server, but sometimes it's not possible (when building changes the names of the assets if you version it for instance). Use what suits you the best.

It's also available as a gist here.

<?php

namespace Deployer;

require 'recipe/symfony4.php';

set('ssh_type', 'native');
set('ssh_multiplexing', true);

// Configuration

// For the repository, master is implied
set('repository', 'git@github.com:user/repo.git');

// Set shared dirs and dirs for Symfony 4
// I share sessions so that atomic builds do not "logout" all users 
// if users I have. This may be a problem if your deployment
// modifies your session system somehow, so be careful
// public/uploads is my standard upload directory for files
// and must be shared between deploys obviously.
set('shared_dirs', ['var/log', 'var/sessions', 'public/uploads']);
set('writable_dirs', ['var', 'public/uploads']);

// Paths to clear
// To avoid leaving unwanted access to these files in production,
// I simply clear what I don't need to run the app, and I run the 
// clear:path _after_ everything has been built.
set('clear_paths', [
  './README.md',
  './.gitignore',
  './.git',
  './.php_cs',
  './.env.dist',
  './.env',
  './.eslintrc',
  './.babelrc',
  '/assets',
  '/tests',
  './package.json',
  './package-lock.json',
  './symfony.lock',
  './webpack.config.js',
  './postcss.config.js',
  './phpunit.xml',
  './phpunit.xml.dist',
  './deploy.php',
  './psalm.xml',
  './composer.phar',
  './composer.lock',
  // We keep composer.json as it's needed by 
  // the Kernel now in Symfony 4
]);

// Set env, else composer will fail
// This is new since Sf3.4 I think, where we use a .env
// file instead of the parameters.yml file. Without these
// parameters, deployer will choke on deploy:vendors
set('env', function () {
    return [
        'APP_ENV' => 'prod',
        'MAILER_URL' => 'null://localhost',
        // Add more if you have other parameters in your .env
    ];
});

// Servers
// This is easy, just the server with a stage name so you can call
// `deploy production`
host('production')
    ->hostname('myhost.com')
    ->user('my_user')
    ->forwardAgent()
    ->set('deploy_path', '/var/www/my_project');

set('default_stage', 'production');
set('http_user', 'www-data');

// Tasks
// If you can / want to build assets locally and then upload, 
// if for instance you don't have the build tools on your frontend
// server.
desc('Build CSS/JS and deploy local built files');
task('deploy:build_local_assets', function () {
    runLocally('npm install');
    runLocally('npm run build');
    upload('./public/build', '{{release_path}}/public/.');
});

// If you want to build remotely
// For remote assets build, we need to know which npm to use
set('bin/npm', function () {
    return (string)run('which npm');
});
desc('Build CSS/JS remotely');
task('deploy:build_remote_assets', function() {
  run("cd {{release_path}} && {{bin/npm}} install && {{bin/npm}} run build");
});

// A simple task to restart the PHP FPM service, 
// if you use it of course
desc('Restart PHP-FPM service');
task('php-fpm:restart', function () {
    // The user must have rights for restart service
    // Change with your exact service version
    run('sudo systemctl restart php7.1-fpm.service');
});
after('deploy:symlink', 'php-fpm:restart');

// If deploy fails, automatically unlock
after('deploy:failed', 'deploy:unlock');

/**
 * The main task - it's basically the same as the symfony4
 * one but with rearranged tasks (especialy for clear_paths)
 * and added tasks (assets, cache, etc)
 */
task('deploy', [
    'deploy:info',
    'deploy:prepare',
    'deploy:lock',
    'deploy:release',
    'deploy:update_code',
    'deploy:shared',
    'deploy:vendors',
    'deploy:build_local_assets',  // Choose which version
    'deploy:build_remote_assets', // you prefer
    'deploy:cache:clear',
    'deploy:cache:warmup',
    'deploy:writable',
    'deploy:clear_paths',
    'deploy:symlink',
    'deploy:unlock',
    'cleanup',
])->desc('Deploy');

// Display success message on completion
after('deploy', 'success');

If you have some ideas to improve this or some comments, as usual, do not hesitate !