Getting started with Bref Cloud

Bref Cloud is a service that makes it easy to deploy and monitor serverless PHP applications on AWS Lambda. Learn more about it on the Bref Cloud homepage .

To get started, create a free Bref Cloud account .

You will be guided through the process of creating an AWS account (if needed) and connecting it to Bref Cloud.

Installing the CLI

To deploy PHP applications using Bref Cloud, you need to install the Bref CLI:


composer global require bref/cli

The global option ensures that the bref CLI is installed globally on your machine in the ~/.composer/vendor/bin directory.

Make sure the command works by running:


bref --version

If the bref command is not found, you need to add Composer’s global bin directory to your PATH. Add this line to your shell configuration file (e.g. ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ~/.profile):


export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.composer/vendor/bin"

If you want to find the location of the Composer’s global installation directory, run composer -n config --global home.

To keep the bref CLI up-to-date, run composer global update bref/cli.

Connecting the CLI

To connect the CLI to your Bref Cloud account, run:


bref login

This command will open a browser window where you can log in to your Bref Cloud account and authorize the CLI to access your account.

When running in a non-interactive environment (e.g. CI/CD, or a Docker container), you can set a BREF_TOKEN environment variable instead. You can create a token in the Bref Cloud dashboard :

either as a personal token , which makes the CLI act on your behalf, with your permissions
or as a “bot token”, which represents a service or a CI/CD pipeline that is not tied to a specific user