Learnings from our multi-tenant Laravel application

In this video we'll be taking an in-depth look at our multi-tenant food ordering app, that's built in Laravel.
We'll talk about our single, shared database approach, and the issues that come with it.
And finally we take a look at how tenant resolving works in our application.
How a flash sale took down our entire system:
• Scaling our Laravel ap...
This project started in 2014 and is still going strong.
00:00 - Introduction
00:18 - Laravel Multitenancy
01:03 - Our database setup
01:48 - Lessons learned
01:55 - 1) Don't use distant relationships
03:59 - 2) Use orWhere with caution
05:31 - 3) Pay extra attention to indices
06:37 - 4) Don't use global scopes
07:29 - Tenant resolving
09:25 - Outro

[@joewlfrd]

This is the best explanation for Laravel Multi-tenant I’ve come across so far. Please consider making a simple tutorial covering this topic in depth. New subscriber and thanks again

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks for the kind words! Great suggestion! 🙏

[@constantine9074]

this channel looks very promising !!! good luck and keep it coming

[@sabatino_masala]

Thank you! Will do!

[@binaryfire]

Another great video! Love the level of technical detail.

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad you enjoyed it! 🙏

[@Claudio_Pereira]

@joewlfrd I agree with you 100%. Sabatino, you brought us a fantastically simple and clear approach! I can't wait for more videos like this. Congratulations and success! 😃🚀

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks for the kind words!

[@johalternate]

It's been long since I found a video so fresh and interesting. Thanks for sharing your experiences. Im definitely looking forward to the video about managing tenant's custom domains.

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks for your kind words!

[@FelixOrwari]

Your lessons are well-explained and are deeply insightful! I also have a multi-tenant application that I have been developing since 2018, and your video couldn't have come at a better time. I especially love how you use middleware to resolve tenants. This is something I will surely borrow. Thank you, Sabatino!

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad it was helpful!

[@jitx2797]

I am building a multi tenant app too. These were very helpful. Thank you very much

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad it was helpful!

[@WebWordsWave]

I really liked your teaching method.. thanks..

[@sabatino_masala]

Thank you!

[@florianlutze9068]

Got this video recommended by KZbin - loved it and watched all of your other videos + subscribed. I just wanted to tell you that your content is really good! Keep it up, I love the Laravel related topics on your product. I am also building a SaaS with Laravel at the moment, so I love to get some insights from other devs. Looking forward to your next videos

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks for the kind words! 🙏

[@gamekonet]

Amazing video as always, and showing real world issues to take account of as a developer or business owner. Best Of Luck!!!

[@sabatino_masala]

Thank you!

[@gamekonet]

@@sabatino_masala you are always welcome! I have a question, I am thinking of making my first commercial project, what are the main topics i should read about and be aware of ? I have been a backend developer for 3 years and already aware of all points of performance as a backend developer, and my brother will handle frontend-side, he also have 3 years experience.

[@brightyouthacademy]

Thank you so much for this

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks for watching!

[@jacksondestima]

Great content! Please upload part 2

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks! Will do!

[@codewithfongoh]

Thank you very much, very insightful

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad it was helpful!

[@philately]

Really nice, useful videos. Thanks!

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad you like them!

[@davaigo2170]

Nice video and audio quality. 👍

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks!

[@raqibnur5086]

Easy to understand 😊

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad to hear that!

[@isabelphillips451]

This is wonderful, i learnt something new today and I'd like to see your Ceryx implementation for reverse proxy. Subscribed!

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks!

[@bulent2435]

Thanks.

[@sabatino_masala]

You're welcome!

[@digvijayad]

Great video! I am in the process of migrating an existing application into a multi-tenant site and your point 1 what I was debating on. Thank you for the insight. Any particular reason for playwright over dusk? Also feature flags are great!

[@sabatino_masala]

Glad it was helpful! Playwright has an easy integration on AWS Lambda, that’s the only reason basically.

[@svndays]

Great video mate, we use a similar approach at a smaller company, it's working well but I am still in the process of converting legacy code, there's a lot of technical debt. Do you use laravel feature tests to make sure you don't accidentally leak other tenants data? Also one thing I came across is we often have big customers who have specific needs and we need to bend the rules of the system for them. Laravel gives us the developer speed necessary to make it happen but it requires careful planning. Using the subdomain to identify tenants has also been an issue for me because we also support logging in from the root domain, so it has to work both ways :)

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks! We do try to write tests for our most-used features, but we mostly rely on E2E tests using Playwright. We develop every feature behind a 'feature flag', so we don't need to bend the rules for specific customers. Instead, we can just enable a feature flag on their account.

[@Kryoxys]

With Laravel 11, you can use the new Context class to pass the tenant into the jobs without having to manually pass it to each job/event.

[@sabatino_masala]

Yes, that’s a life saver indeed!

[@kennedymwenda3357]

You can do a more detailed video on managing SSL on subdomains if you don't mind. On my SAAS app I had used wildcard subdomains. Also how to setup automatic DNS configuration in a case where a tenant adds a full domain.

[@sabatino_masala]

Next video will cover this!

[@kennedymwenda3357]

@@sabatino_masala Ok thanks

[@jacobtims569]

Really helpful video! I've also created a multi-tenant application and ran into many of these problems. One of the problems we still have issues with is tenant-specific email configuration. Can you cover this topic in your next video?

[@sabatino_masala]

Great tip! It’s something we do as well, some customers want us to use their SMTP server, while others only want to customise the ‘from’ address. IIRC: we do this by having a ‘BaseMail’ class that takes in our tenant, and overrides the default (fallback) mail configuration. Every mail we create inherits from this BaseMail class.

[@eduh12]

Amazing video, I would like to hear more information about the Ceryx proxy and how it's used in production

[@sabatino_masala]

Next video will cover this!

[@JarkkoHautakorpi]

I just did a multitenant Laravel app, except each tenant has a separate database, which has some 3rd party software db. Tenant is set in the url and middleware selects the correct database connections. Multiple databases, some common databases and some selected by the tenant in middleware. Models extend common/tenant, and so the queries go to the db that middleware activated.

[@sabatino_masala]

Very nice! How many tenants do you have? How do you deal with migrations?

[@riadhossain5701]

Queries to know!

[@JarkkoHautakorpi]

@@sabatino_masala There are no migrations on a 3rd party app db. Only 4 tenants 🙂SOAP classes and db models are auto generated , from ~100 tables.

[@JarkkoHautakorpi]

@@sabatino_masala Btw, for complex queries like reports and such, it is better to use SQL Views and not Eloquent, except read-only eloquent model for the view. Views can be put in another DB and for those you can use migratios also (when you can't edit 3rd party db)

[@taslimsuman]

I'm also doing the same way for my multi tenant rental app

[@sabatino_masala]

🙌

[@shadyarbzharothman8689]

Thanks for the video, I have a multi tenant multi database approach and now I want to host it but coz I'm new I don't know where to host, My company want to host it in digital ocean but I need to work with CLI, do you have any suggestion?

[@sabatino_masala]

We host our database on AWS using RDS. Our application servers are on Linode, but I wouldn’t recommend that. DigitalOcean is fine, but maybe take a look at Amazon EC2 as well, it pairs very well with RDS.

[@shadyarbzharothman8689]

@@sabatino_masala Thanks

[@kobbyadjei263]

Great video...looking for to a tutorial on how to achieve similar thing and hopefully that would be soon

[@sabatino_masala]

Thanks!

[@meerachaturvedi9050]

I am going to have a multitenant with multi domain and multidatabase but the problem is whethere i should go with readymade theme available on codecayon or go with in house development. I am targeting nearly 20k tenants in a year So afraid of collapse of code available on cadecayon .

[@sabatino_masala]

I bought my fair share of Codecanyon projects - and always regretted it. I wouldn't touch anything on Codecanyon as the code quality is usually garbage.

[@ben53933]

Noob here. May I ask to make a video talking about the difference between using Laravel and Code Igniter ? And, when should I use which.

[@sabatino_masala]

Not a big Codeigniter guy I’m afraid 😅 I’ve been doing Laravel for 10+ years, and did CakePHP/Slim before that

[@khawarali3720]

please tell us how you are handling jobs for tenants?

[@sabatino_masala]

Every job receives a ‘tenant’ in the constructor, but in Laravel 11 you can use ‘context’

[@amanprasadoo7]

Please make a tutorial for multi tenancy website please ❤

[@sabatino_masala]

Will add it to my idea list, thanks for the suggestion!

[@wilbertdune]

what app is this?

[@sabatino_masala]

It’s called Unipage, it’s a European food ordering system, with customers in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, …

[@WellnessAndFitnessHub]

Hi, great video. How can I contact you?

[@sabatino_masala]

I started a discord community server at discord.gg/nTpQanKduF - feel free to join me there!

[@WellnessAndFitnessHub]

@@sabatino_masala I dropped a message

[@IleniaQuintero]

Hello, I was looking at your video channel. We may be helping a company that uses secure images to increase supply chain security and help cloud native development. Would you be willing to help try their software, make a video, and help show devs how to use their tools? This is not an offer, but just to start a conversation about your willingness to take on sponsorship. Please provide me with your email if you are interested. You'd have a chance to look at their technology and decide if it's the type of software that you'd be interested in covering in your channel.

[@sabatino_masala]

You can reach out to [e-mail]