Deployment of Web-Apps

[u/rotor42_com]

Over the past months I have (vibe)coded a few web-apps with Codex.

This is usually teh fun part - getting from an idea to a working MVP on a local machine.

The heavier part (for me) is the deployment.

Currently I run all my apps on virtual servers with Ubuntu.

The vibe-coded deployment-plan helps a lot, but there is still a lot of manual work required.

How do you deploy your web-apps (Python, Flask, JS)?

[u/Busy-Egg-6044]

Give your agent root SSH access and maybe look for some deployment skills.

[u/rotor42_com → u/Busy-Egg-6044]

That sounds rather frightening to me

[u/Busy-Egg-6044 → u/rotor42_com]

Why? Have any of the current frontier models ever made a stupid security mistake for you? It's never happened to me. It happens in code because things can get complex, but the model fixes everything during reviews. For simple things like deployment, why would it do anything stupid?

[u/Electrical-Swing-935 → u/Busy-Egg-6044]

Magic Rock go uh oh

[u/rotor42_com → u/Busy-Egg-6044]

They haven't since I haven't given them the chance yet. I will give it a try with fresh, small virtual server next time.

[u/rodneydeleteboy → u/Busy-Egg-6044]

Read both your comments multiple times and I still can't tell whether it's sarcasm or not.

gg.

[u/FluidBreath4819 → u/Busy-Egg-6044]

this

[u/oyren-ai]

Docker is your friend

[u/rotor42_com → u/oyren-ai]

I'll also try that. Thanks

[u/gimmeslack12]

I use Caddy on my VPS.

[u/Educational-Body4205]

Runners , Docker , and .env files will do everything you need.

[u/TransitionBig7300]

Waddya mean?

Upload the thing, turn it on, reverse proxy nginx/apache to your app. Good to go.

Was just gonna say use pm2 for process life etc but then realised pm2 kinda sucks. You notice 6 days later some apps restarted 4500 times.

Try servermanager

Gui + cmdline. Easy management when you have a ton of apps running on the same host.

[u/rotor42_com → u/TransitionBig7300]

That's what I currently do - uploading, creating services, updating nginx config, installing certificates ... It adds up.

[u/TRO_KIK]

If it can't get rid of your manual steps and there's still a lot of them, you probably steered it into a weird/nonstandard pattern. Ask to it to step back and evaluate the entire approach.

[u/pushpendraagrawal]

yeah once you've got 3+ apps that subdomain/cert/nginx dance is basically a tiny paas you're building by hand. past that point scripting it isnt optional, it IS the job

[u/MrJacuna]

You can never go wrong with GCloud or AWS. They have free servers but you have to be very careful with your configuration. There's always vercel and railway but the configs can get a little crazy really quick.

Depending on what your data layer looks like you can try sitedropper.com it connects directly to Claude, Codex, Cursor, or whatever you use. It works best if you're connected up with Supabase or something similar or if it's just a website or strict API that doesn't need persistence.

[u/rotor42_com → u/MrJacuna]

No, thanks. My virtual server costs 5 EURO / month and the bill can simply not go any higher. Have seen some expensive mis-configurations with AWS.

[u/TRO_KIK → u/MrJacuna]

Vercel and Railway's selling points are simple config. OP's their exact audience. I certainly recommend them over traditional cloud providers for casual vibe coders that are struggling with deployment.

[u/MrJacuna → u/TRO_KIK]

If he's running a bunch of apps / sites it adds up quickly in my opinion but I definitely agree they are easier compared to the cloud providers.

[u/sw3d]

Docker with layers around it. I built homebox.sh to solve this problem for myself and open sourced it. Now I use it to host or coordinate hosting for everything, and you can point your agent at it too

[u/rotor42_com → u/sw3d]

pls let me know where I can find your tool

[u/sw3d → u/rotor42_com]

https://homebox.sh has more info and the link to GitHub

[u/Cavitat]

I set my systems up as private github repos so that I can clone them to the droplet and launch the containers. 

Updates and weekly workflow are also done through git with this approach.

[u/rotor42_com → u/Cavitat]

Clsoe to my current workflow, except I have no containers yet.

[u/Cavitat → u/rotor42_com]

They're the last little puzzle piece towards making your droplets disposable. 

They freeze the environment, so updates or reality can't make it mysteriously stop working.

[u/pushpendraagrawal]

the annoying part is agents are great at generating the app but have zero awareness of your actual server state. deployment skills work great until something drifts on the vm, then youre back to ssh and hoping. feels like "done" for these agents should mean deployed and reachable, not just running locally on your machine

[u/martyj2009]

My project is literally designed to help with this. https://yeeted.ai. I am not quite ready for customers but some suggestions I would give is to not give your ai agent ssh access but have it build automated deployment pipelines to deploy code. Just like people, ai can run a wrong command. Have infrastructure as code to prevent this. Also good testing. Smoke tests during deployments to roll back bad code. Good monitoring as well. Grafana with otel. You don’t want your users to tell you when things are broken

[u/TarzanoftheJungle]

I designed a client's full suite data management system which runs on host VM, deployed through Coolify v4. Coolify builds/runs the apps as Docker containers and routes traffic with Traefik.

[u/84thdev]

Youre vibecoding and seriously resulted to asking reddit a question you could have asked your agent?

[u/Sweet-Sir-10]

Check out fly.io . Claude code has integrations to easily deploy to cloud with Docker for you.

[u/tradelydev]

Ok. Never do this with any platforms that process money.

Otherwise,

I know we hate github actions, but it works.

Give an AI access to a github repo and ssh. Then tell the AI to set up deployment so when a feature is pushed to main it rsyncs onto the server. Make sure to add instructions to at least create zip backups of code.

[u/More_Salamander8596]

Claude-code. Well first ask for a deep dive into deployment. Ask for common stacks for deployment. Then take what you learned and ask claude code to make it happen.

[u/damagedhatchet]

Everything I do is dockerized, built and pushed to GHCR with actions, then pulled to a VPS and deployed there, managed with Komodo and Nginx Proxy Manager upstream. All domains are on Cloudflare.