Getting started

Scalpels is a control plane for Built for Cloud applications. It coordinates work in your team's own GitHub, Laravel Cloud, and Laravel Forge accounts. The applications, their infrastructure, and their product data stay in those accounts; Scalpels stores the control-plane records and credentials needed to manage them.

The basic path

1. Create a Scalpels login and verify its email address.
2. Name your first team. You become its Owner.
3. Connect the team's GitHub account or organization.
4. Connect the team's Laravel Cloud account.
5. Open the catalog, review a product's requirements, and install it.

Only the first team is created during onboarding. A login can later belong to several teams and can switch between them.

What an install does

Each catalog product has a manifest. The manifest specifies its PHP version, required Cloud resources, application-owned environment keys, build steps, post-deploy commands, and any recipe for connecting other applications to it.

When you install, Scalpels forks or reuses the product repository in the connected GitHub account, creates or reuses the matching Laravel Cloud application, prepares an environment, provisions the manifest's resources, attaches them, and deploys the application.

Scalpels does not clean up Cloud resources automatically after a failed deployment. The deployment page keeps the completed steps and resource identifiers visible so you can decide what to keep or remove.

If you already run a product

Open Team settings → Existing installs after connecting Laravel Cloud. The scan reads the applications and environments in that Cloud account and changes nothing. An Owner or Admin can then adopt a verified Built for Cloud installation so Scalpels records and manages it without creating another application.

Connect Laravel Forge only when you want Scalpels to discover and attach products to sites already running there.