DEV Community

Cover image for The easiest way to publish your project
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

Posted on

The easiest way to publish your project

A few days ago Digital Ocean ran a new option in their service. It's called "Apps". This is the best option for devs who want to publish their project but don't have dev ops experience.

Everything that you must do is create a new app using the app's creator. You connect your GitHub account, choose the project that you want to deploy and that's it. Of course, if you need to set additional configuration it's not so simple but for simple landing pages or static websites, it's enough.

I recommend you to try this service because 3 projects are free. The best in it is autoscaling. If you create a project then Digital Ocean will scale the machines to handle traffic in your app.

As they said, "Focus on code, not on infrastructure".

Please let me know if you use it and what do you think about services like that.

Top comments (12)

Collapse
 
thewdhanat profile image
Thew

It'll be good to mention that 3 free projects is only for static sites served through Cloudflare though you can also deploy them on Vercel for unlimited free, Render or Netlify.

For computing service, they competitors are Heroku and Render.

I hope in the future they will add more options to deploy from other than GitHub ex. cli.

Collapse
 
robertotcestari profile image
Roberto Cestari

Too expensive, isnt it?

Collapse
 
seanmclem profile image
Seanmclem • Edited

The pricing scheme seems elaborate, but inexpensive if you're deploying hobby projects and affordable if you're running a business.

digitalocean.com/docs/app-platform...

Collapse
 
justjordant profile image
Jordan Taylor

You may be better off just paying for a 20$ instance that can support more than one project. 5 bucks are going to add very fast for different projects here and there.

Collapse
 
alvinqingxing profile image
Alvin Lim

I've published apps to the free tiers on GCP, Heroku, and Netlify, and like Digital Ocean they offer easy ways to deploy your apps to production, e.g. with Heroku and Netlify you can connect to your Github account and the platforms will deploy your code with each new push

Collapse
 
maorkavod profile image
maorkavod

The easiest way is not the best way. Usually the easiest way is the wrong way.

Collapse
 
rockykev profile image
Rocky Kev

Can you give an example in regards to deployment?

Collapse
 
maorkavod profile image
maorkavod

I'm using clean cent os linux server on aws, setup everything menually by my self, than create bash script that install it with all the dependencies automatically for my future projects. When i see that my project is running, i create an image from that server for future projects from the same framework & technology.

My personal opinion is that you should never create dependencies in a third party company. Especially not for projects in production environments.

Collapse
 
dragonejt profile image
Evan Jianchen Tung

When I tried to deploy a nodejs app with different folder sfor frontend and backend it could not automatically run. I also had no way to issue commands to make the app run.

Collapse
 
octocodeio profile image
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

True, they recommend using the public folder to publish assets. I don't know if it's possible to use a custom folder. Probably yes but I didn't read anything yet about it.

Collapse
 
dragonejt profile image
Evan Jianchen Tung

Sorry I completely misinterpreted and misunderstood the premise of app hosting services like Heroku or DigitalOcean's new App Platform. I thought that you could still run shell commands on a specific app like npm start or something. I just found out that app hosting services in general offer little configurability, so yeah completely a misunderstanding on my part. It would be good to have documentation on how digitalocean's app platform detects what to do on hosting a new app, that way I can build my folder structure to make it run on digitaloceans app platform. I searched google and it doesnt appear to have such documentation.

Collapse
 
developerantoniosousa profile image
Antonio Sousa

Cool! I will test it later. Thanks for sharing =)