Deploy to Render

Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto-deploys from Git, including databases!

Render tl;dr Deploy

If you simply want to experience the Render deployment process, including a Postgres or SQLite database, you can do the following:

1. create a new Cedar project: yarn create cedar-app ./render-deploy
2. after your "render-deploy" project installation is complete, init git, commit, and add it as a new repo to GitHub or GitLab
3. run the command yarn cedar setup deploy render, use the flag --database to select from postgresql, sqlite or none to proceed without a database [default : postgresql]. Note: sqlite stores its database file on a persistent disk, which Render's free plan doesn't support — the setup command will prompt you to confirm putting the api service on a paid plan before generating render.yaml. postgresql and none stay on the free plan.
4. commit the generated render.yaml, then create a new Blueprint from your repo at https://dashboard.render.com/iacs
5. after the first deploy, replace the destination placeholder in render.yaml's rewrite rule with your api service's URL, then commit and push it.

For a more detailed walkthrough, see Render's Deploying Redwood guide. It predates the Cedar fork and uses rw naming throughout, but it's still the most thorough deploy walkthrough available for this setup. Everywhere it says yarn rw, use yarn cedar instead, and the rest applies as written.

Database Migrations

The generated render.yaml runs prisma migrate deploy as part of the api service's startCommand (yarn cedar deploy render api, see renderHandler.ts), right before the server starts accepting traffic. That's intentional, and not a stand-in for a missing feature: Render has a native pre-deploy command (preDeployCommand in the Blueprint spec) for exactly this kind of task, but it has two limitations that rule it out as the default here:

• Paid instances only — the pre-deploy command isn't available on Render's free plan, but Cedar's generated api service defaults to plan: free (see the tl;dr walkthrough above).
• No persistent disk access — it "executes on a separate instance from your running service" and can't reach an attached persistent disk, so it couldn't run migrations against the sqlite deploy option's database file, which lives on one.

If you're on a paid plan and using Postgres (i.e. not the sqlite deploy option), you can switch to preDeployCommand instead: move the prisma migrate deploy call out of startCommand and into a preDeployCommand entry on the api service in render.yaml.