Laravel Forge Adds Managed Valkey and Object Storage Buckets

Laravel Forge has quietly been turning into more than a server provisioning tool over the past couple of years, and the latest round of updates pushes that further. Two additions stand out: managed Valkey as a datastore, and managed object storage, both provisioned and controlled directly from the Forge dashboard alongside your existing servers and databases.

Valkey joins Forge as a first-class datastore

If you haven't been following the Redis ecosystem drama, Valkey is the Linux Foundation-backed fork that emerged after Redis changed its license away from a fully open source model. A lot of infrastructure providers have been migrating their "Redis" offerings to Valkey under the hood since it's a drop-in compatible alternative, and Forge is doing the same.

What this means practically: you can now provision a fully managed Valkey instance from the Forge dashboard the same way you'd provision a managed MySQL or Postgres database, without SSHing into a server and running apt install redis-server yourself, or standing up a separate box just to host your cache and queue backend. Forge handles the provisioning, and since Valkey speaks the same protocol Redis does, your existing config/database.php Redis configuration and any package that expects a Redis-compatible connection works without changes.

// config/database.php, unchanged
'redis' => [
    'client' => env('REDIS_CLIENT', 'phpredis'),

    'default' => [
        'host' => env('REDIS_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'password' => env('REDIS_PASSWORD'),
        'port' => env('REDIS_PORT', '6379'),
        'database' => env('REDIS_DB', '0'),
    ],
],

Point that at your new Forge-managed Valkey instance and you're done. Laravel's Redis integration was never coupled to Redis-the-company's specific implementation, it's just talking the wire protocol, so this is about as close to a non-event migration as infrastructure changes get.

Managed object storage buckets

The other addition is managed object storage: create and manage S3-compatible buckets directly from the Forge dashboard, sitting next to your servers and databases instead of being a separate account with a separate provider you have to configure and bill separately.

For a lot of smaller Laravel projects, this closes a gap that's existed for a while. Setting up file storage that survives a server restart or scales past a single disk has generally meant creating an AWS S3 bucket (or a Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, or similar), generating access keys, and wiring up a whole separate dashboard and billing relationship just to store user uploads. Now that step can happen in the same place you're already managing everything else about your app's infrastructure.

Wiring it into a Laravel app is the same as any other S3-compatible disk, update your config/filesystems.php disk credentials to point at the Forge-provisioned bucket:

'buckets' => [
    'driver' => 's3',
    'key' => env('FORGE_BUCKET_KEY'),
    'secret' => env('FORGE_BUCKET_SECRET'),
    'region' => env('FORGE_BUCKET_REGION'),
    'bucket' => env('FORGE_BUCKET_NAME'),
    'endpoint' => env('FORGE_BUCKET_ENDPOINT'),
],

Because it speaks the standard S3 API, Storage::disk('buckets')->put(...) and everything else in Laravel's filesystem abstraction works exactly like it would against AWS.

Why this matters more than it might sound

Individually, "you can now click a button instead of running a shell command" isn't a huge story. What it points at is Forge's broader trajectory: consolidating more of the infrastructure a typical Laravel app needs, compute, database, cache, queues, storage, into one dashboard and one billing relationship, without giving up the flexibility of "it's just a real server, not a black box PaaS." For solo developers and small teams, that consolidation is worth real money and real time, fewer accounts to manage, fewer places credentials can leak, and one fewer vendor to evaluate when you're setting up a new project.

If you're currently running your own Redis instance or paying a separate object storage bill for a Forge-managed app, it's worth a look at whether migrating those pieces over simplifies your stack without giving anything up. Details on both features are in the Forge changelog and the Laravel blog's product update roundup.