@dineshstack
Senior Full Stack Developer · Building SaaS products & teaching Laravel/React · 10+ years experience · Founder of Orion360 · Based in Dubai, UAE.
The wallet buttons that showed on web but never in the app: the three gates that control them, the certificate Apple's docs misdirect you on, and a rollout that can't strand test tokens.
The tutorials show you the happy path. This post shows you every error we actually hit deploying a Laravel API and Next.js frontend to a VPS with GitHub Actions — in order, with the exact fix for each one.
Four follow-up migrations in seven weeks, a column named 36 that is still in production, and a repair that used the wrong type. What went wrong, why each one exited green, and how to fix them without downtime.
CI is red and the error makes no sense. Here's the exact diagnostic process I follow — reading raw logs, reproducing locally with the same PHP version, and the five failure classes that explain 90% of CI breaks.
Next.js prints ○ ● ƒ ◐ and explains only the ones your build happened to use. Here is the decision tree it walks to choose one, read from the source — and the order to check when a route you expected to be static comes back ƒ.
The releases/ symlink pattern explained: how to deploy Laravel to a $6/month VPS server using GitHub Actions and SSH, with zero downtime, instant rollback, and no paid Forge subscription required.
The right way to handle API keys, database passwords, and Laravel APP_KEY in CI without ever putting secrets in your YAML files. Covers repository secrets, environment secrets, and the .env.example contract pattern.
Make code style and static analysis automatic gates. No more "I forgot to run Pint" in review. No more type errors reaching production. Here's how to configure a Code Quality job that blocks merges — including the PHPStan baseline trick for legacy codebases.
Want to contribute to an open-source AI trading bot? Here's how — where help is most needed (strategy, ML, dashboard, DevOps), how to set up the project locally on testnet, and how to submit your first pull request. All skill levels welcome; non-code contributions count too.
