Just push and done, it will deploy.
On Previous Articles We Discussed complex ways to prepare software to run in production environments and one could ask "is it all really necessary?" and no one could blame such question as dumb.
To be fair, industrial-level solutions like kubernetes are not about ease of use but resource control instead. This issue is not new but it is also not a problem affecting everyone. Small business and freelancers just need the application up and running somewhere and that's it.
In fact, There are several services that solves the deployment issue in a simple and neat way, let's see a few just as example.
Before we advertise services for free, these are the key benefits we seek on this kind of solution:
So let's get started.
Heroku is one of the oldest and best git-based-deployment solutions in activity. It used to have a free tier, but now it's gone.
All setup can be made using the web dashboard, it asks for permissions on your git repository, asks for a branch and that's it, one push merged, one deploy.
There is no free-tier anymore and by the time this article was written, the cheapest option would cost $5 USD.
DO App Platform is one of the newest services providing publish and forget solutions.
All setup can be made using the web dashboard, it asks for permissions on your git repository, asks for a branch and that's it, one push merged, one deploy.
There is no free-tier in practice; what they offer for $5 USD is a container serving static content and by the time this article was written, the cheapest real option to run a node project would cost $12 USD.
Cloud Run has interesting features like Docker container support and vpc integration so you can integrate and grow to a more complex cloud solution over the time. But luckily it's pretty much the same as any other git-based-deployment solutions.
All setup can be made using the web dashboard, it asks for permissions on your git repository, asks for a branch and that's it, one push merged, one deploy.
There is a free tier based on usage, which is nice because you can use that one for your pet projects with no worries or surprises in the credit-card bill.
Render offers a free tier but with some limitations. It does, however, a full featured git deployment once you authorize the application to access your GitHub or GitLab account.
The sample project has zero knowledge of those service providers yet it went live in less than 5 minutes.
This is good because there is no vendor lock-in and also shows that all those
services tend to respect some defaults, like the $PORT variable environment and
the default entrypoint for application type (npm start for our example).
Get code up and running should not be a challenge specially if you are the entire team or if your budget isn't that great.
Dig and you will find a lot more options.
Happy hacking!