Ghostable’s Origin Story: When Security Becomes the Easy Path

Discovering Laravel

I first discovered Laravel in late 2014 while doing technical R&D for a startup we were launching—the cybersecurity education company Curricula. What immediately stood out was its elegant documentation and intuitive structure. I was hooked, and I’ve been building with Laravel ever since.

Like most startup founders, I wore a lot of hats. Mornings might be spent sketching content for our episodes; evenings, buried in code.

For the first five years, I ran the platform’s engineering solo—or “solo-ish.” While I was the only engineer at Curricula back then, I had the Laravel community at my back—helping troubleshoot obscure edge cases and scale right as Vapor was announced.

When Scale Meets Security

By early 2020, as we kicked off our Series A investment round, we faced the expected gauntlet of technical due diligence. As a cybersecurity company, expectations were high—and we delivered. But the truth was that much of our discipline held because we were still an engineering team of one. I knew that would change once we started scaling.

Scaling isn’t just about hiring—it’s about building systems and practices that keep standards high without slowing the team down. Many teams have thoughtful workflows on paper, but those processes often fall apart when reality intrudes: an emergency release, a production fire, a teammate on vacation, or a new developer onboarding. Under pressure, people take the path of least resistance. Corners get cut, Slack messages fly, and environment variables end up in the wrong place. It’s not negligence—it’s that the workflow made it too hard to stay disciplined.

This would be something that stuck with me all the way through our acquisition in 2022. It shaped how I thought about scaling engineering teams and building systems that people will actually want to use, even under pressure.

The Mission

Even well-run teams can struggle with .env management—it’s simply too easy for things to slip when pressure is high. When researchers uncovered over 260,000 Laravel APP_KEYs publicly exposed—it confirmed what I already believed: environment variables are one of the most overlooked yet critical parts of an app’s security posture.

That’s the gap Ghostable grew out of. The product evolved over time, but the mission never changed: make the secure path the easy and default path for Laravel developers.

• Deliver a Laravel-first developer experience, whether from the CLI or the dashboard.
• Keep it absolutely secure—without turning security into a chore.
• Make it affordable, so small teams and solo devs aren’t priced out of strong security.

With Ghostable, Laravel teams can push and pull .env files with confidence:

• Onboarding a new developer shouldn’t mean digging through outdated “secure notes” or sending dm'ing secrets.
• Rolling back a bad config shouldn’t feel like detective work—teams should instantly see what changed, when, and by whom.
• Sharing sensitive variables should be simple, safe, and fast, not hacked together with ad-hoc fixes.

Try It Out

Ghostable’s free tier is built for small teams—perfect for solo devs or pairs working on their next big idea.

👉 Get Started Free

Try it out, let us know what’s missing, and we’ll make sure it gets better.