What is the simplest way to get Redwood deployed as a publicly accessible site?

MarkBennett · February 18, 2022, 4:49pm

In preperation for the v1 launch soon, I’m helping update the Deploy Docs to welcome all the new Redwood.js users soon to join the community.

Based on the discussion in this Github Issue I’m looking for the simplest way to deploy a Redwood.js app as quickly as possible, with support for:

web and api sides
database migrations
automated deploys from GitHub
running database migrations when the db changes

There are bonus points if the solution is:

Free
Can go from rw create to rw deploy in under 10 minutes

I’m leaning towards suggesting Render.io, but recently tried a deploy and had to upgrade to their paid tier before the api service would build and deploy properly.

As part of my PR, I’m also going to move the service specific deployment directions into their own documents to make the deployment page simpler for new developers to understand.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome here, or on GitHub!

github.com/redwoodjs/redwoodjs.com

Deploy Doc improvements

opened 01:25AM - 12 Feb 22 UTC

thedavidprice

cc @MarkBennett The [Deploy Doc](https://redwoodjs.com/docs/deploy) is in nee…d of some TLC. Some initial thoughts: ## Intro - need to make it serverless or traditional infr agnostic + highlight you can switch as you go with zero code changes - need to include Data migration as a deploy process step (along with Prisma DB migrations) ## General Deployment Setup This just needs some cleaning up: - There's a lot more you can do with redwood.toml config for paths: link to doc - Build command: should link to doc and explain how build works and can examine locally - Prisma and Database: should also include data migrations, link to docs - Environment Variables: make sure we highlight that you need to manually handle Web env vars ## All the "tl;dr" Deploy sections --> create a "Quick Start" section at the beginning I'd like to remove the "tl;dr Deploy" sections for each provider. Instead, we can include a kind of "Deployment Quick Start" section at the beginning — the point being to help people experience deploying a Redwood project with minimal steps required. See this tweet as an example of what we can do: https://twitter.com/jlengstorf/status/1491530279147622400?s=20&t=3bsdPNcZ5sqf_Gl0oVpXGg Some thoughts: - clone the [Redwood Tutorial repo](https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood-tutorial) (or other Example Apps when ready for v1) - need to handle using Postgres: schema.prisma, run prisma migrate dev, use Railway for DB (see [reference section in Tutorial](https://learn.redwoodjs.com/docs/tutorial/deployment#the-database)) - then can be used to try out any of the hosting provider

rob · February 18, 2022, 4:54pm

Netlify is still the deploy option in the tutorial. We wanted to switch to Render as well but we ran into the same problem—out of memory errors on the first deploy.

Netlify has been super simple though, other than setting up a couple of environment variables (DATABASE_URL and SESSION_SECRET if you’re using dbAuth) you really just link to your GitHub repo and click a button!

MarkBennett · February 18, 2022, 5:48pm

Ok. I’ll focus on using Netlify then and show a simpler version of what’s in the tutorial:

For the database, I noticed that we’re using Railway but mention that connection pooling could be an issue with Netlify and Railway. Supabase does require a sign up, but is the best free way to address these concerns that I’ve heard of.

I assume we’ll want to stick with Railway for the quick start guide, correct?

MarkBennett · February 18, 2022, 5:50pm

Also, is there a CTA we should be looking for here? I was thinking it might be fun to add a Tweet button or something to the start page that we could get people to use to share a link to their new Redwood site on Twitter or similair?

Alternatively, is there a good channel on Discord we should encourage them to share a screenshot on to celebrate their progress?

jacebenson · February 19, 2022, 5:23am

You can even generate a link to build the environment variables for you with something like Hack the "Deploy to Netlify" Button Using Environment Variables to Make a Customizable Site Generator | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks.

MarkBennett · February 19, 2022, 8:30pm

That’s a great suggestion @jacebenson. I wonder if there should be a way to include that in new apps?

jacebenson · February 19, 2022, 8:56pm

I have it set up for my… project thing on tskr.io the “deploy” button generates a random session secret on the client but it still needs a postgresql connection string to build on single deploy. If you want to talk about it hit me up on Discord.