What's harder about deploying a Rails app? Generally interested. How does it go in Laravel land then? Rails have quite a few dependencis (Node, webpack), how is Laravel handling front end?
I'll preface this by saying I'm probably getting a little ahead of my skis. :) But, I think the issue is less how modern PHP is handling all those modern dependencies and more how "old" PHP didn't make you, the person installing the application, have to know anything about them. Those old-style apps, which include WordPress and many forum software packages, get "deployed" by
1. Downloading the application archive and uncompressing it
2. Creating a MySQL database according to the documentation
3. Either editing a small config file to give the application the database credentials, or even just going to the application's index page and filling in the details on a first run experience
And... that's it. Rails has no comparable experience, unless -- like Discourse -- you put in a lot of work to get it there.
Laravel -- and Symfony -- work basically like other "modern" frameworks do, for both good and bad. Laravel has "Mix," built on webpack, for instance. So if you're looking for that in PHP, it's there, but that's kind of a tradeoff in the context of small sites deployed/managed by a single person -- a use case that I think modern webdevs sometimes lose sight of. If we go back to the example of forums, those are very often that "one person wants to host a forum for their community" kinds of things. (And I'd like to see more of us get back to self-hosted blogs -- which is part of what led me down the road of "can you write something in a not-PHP language that's still easy for someone who doesn't know anything about web development to deploy and run." The answer still seems to be "reply hazy; ask again later.")
