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Deployment

When you're ready to deploy your Formidable application to production, there are some important things you can do to make sure your application is running as efficiently as possible. In this document, we'll cover some great starting points for making sure your Formidable application is deployed properly.

Server Requirements​

The Formidable framework has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum Node version:

  • Node >=18.*
  • npm/pnpm/yarn/bun

Deploy​

Formidable is Heroku-ready out of the box. Here are some few things you may need to do to get started:

Create a Procfile in the root of your application with the following content:

Procfile
web: npm start
cron: node craftsman schedule:run

If your application is making use of the queue system, you can add the following line to your Procfile:

Procfile
worker: node craftsman queue:work
info

Don't forget to add production .env details to Heroku. Remember to set APP_DEBUG to false.

That's all you need to do to get started.

Nginx​

If you need more control over your server and application, we recommend deploying to a Linux server and using Nginx and PM2.

Before getting started, make sure the following prerequisites are met:

Serving Your Application​

Now that you have all the dependencies, you can go ahead and create a ecosystem.config.js file in the root of your application:

ecosystem.config.js
module.exports = {
    apps: [
        {
            name: "web",
            script: "npm run start",
            time: true,
            error_file: "./storage/logs/web/error.log",
            out_file: "./storage/logs/web/log.log"
        },
        {
            name: "cron",
            script: "node craftsman schedule:run --no-ansi",
            max_memory_restart: "100M",
            time: true,
            error_file: "./storage/logs/cron/error.log",
            out_file: "./storage/logs/cron/log.log"
        }
    ]
}

And finally, start your application:

pm2 start ecosystem.config.js

By default, this will start our application on http://127.0.0.1:3000, we can change port in the server file:

server
Server
    .use(require('./.formidable/build').default)
    .start({
        port: 3000,
        host: '127.0.0.1'
    })
info

We also recommend you enable PM2 to auto start your application on system boot. You can do this by running the command: pm2 startup

Creating a Reverse Proxy​

Now that you have started your application you can go ahead and create a virtual host:

/etc/nginx/sites-available/app.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name _;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
        proxy_http_version 1.0;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

Once thats done, we can check for any issues on our newly created app.conf:

sudo nginx -t

If everything is fine, we should see a "success" message. Then we can enable our application by creating a symbolic link of the app.conf file from the /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/app.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Now, for changes to reflect, you will need to restart Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx

And now you should be able to access your application 🎉🎉🎉

Automating things​

Its not always practical to ssh into your server to pull your latest changes. Because of this, we may wish to automate things a bit using Bash scripts.

Here's a simple bash script that pulls the latest changes from a repo and run the necessary commands:

/root/deploy.sh
echo "Jump to application folder"
cd /root/app

echo "Update application from Git"
git pull

echo "Install application dependencies"
npm install

echo "Build application"
npm run build

echo "Put application in maintenance mode"
node craftsman down

echo "Run database migrations"
node craftsman migrate:latest --no-interaction

echo "Restart application"
pm2 restart ecosystem.config.js

echo "Put application back online"
node craftsman up

This script can be triggered by a Github Action, for example. When we push to our main branch, we can have a Github Workflow that ssh's into our server on our behalf and executes the deploy.sh script:

.github/workflows/deploy.yaml
name: Deploying

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: executing remote ssh commands using ssh key
        uses: appleboy/ssh-action@master
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.HOST }}
          username: ${{ secrets.USER }}
          key: ${{ secrets.KEY }}
          script: sh /root/deploy.sh
info

This is only an example. You don't have to use Github to be able to Automate your deployments. The same can also be achieved with Gitlab and Bitbucket Pipelines.

Docker​

You can also use Docker to deploy your application. Here's a simple Dockerfile that you can use to build your application:

Dockerfile
FROM node:18-alpine

# Create app directory
RUN mkdir -p /usr/app
WORKDIR /usr/app

# Install app dependencies
COPY package.json /usr/app/
RUN npm install

# Bundle app source
COPY . /usr/app
RUN npm run build
COPY . /usr/app

EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["npm", "start"]
info

Set APP_DEBUG to false in your .env file before building your application for production.

Vercel​

Vercel is another great option for deploying your Formidable application. While Formidable is not officially supported by Vercel, you can still deploy your application to Vercel by following these steps:

Configure your application​

First, you need to trust a couple of dependencies by adding them to your package.json file:

package.json
{
    ...
    "trustedDependencies": [
        "bcrypt",
        "esbuild",
        "sqlite3"
    ],
    ...
}

Then create a vercel.json file in the root of your application:

vercel.json
{
    "buildCommand": "bun run build",
    "installCommand": "bun install",
    "outputDirectory": ".formidable/public",
    "devCommand": "bun run dev",
    "rewrites": [
        {
            "source": "/(.*)",
            "destination": "/api/serverless.js"
        }
    ]
}

You can also use npm or yarn or pnpm instead of bun. However, we recommend using the bun package manager in this case.

Create a serverless function​

Next, we need to create a serverless function that will serve as our entry point. Create a serverless.js file in the api directory:

api/serverless.js
const formidable = require('../.formidable/build').default

export default async (req, res) => {
    const application = await formidable
    const app = application.fastify()

    await app.ready()
    app.server.emit('request', req, res)
}
info

Your serverless function must be named serverless.js and must be located in the api directory.

Deploy​

Finally, you can deploy your application to Vercel by running the following command:

vercel
info

You can find the instructions for installing the Vercel CLI here.

Considerations​

While this approach works, there are some things you need to consider:

Logging​

By default, Formidable logs to the storage/logs directory. However, Vercel does not allow writing to the file system. So, you will need to use the console channel instead. You can change the default log channel in the .env file:

.env
LOG_CHANNEL=console
Database​

Vercel supports Formidable's pgsql driver. So, you can use Postgres as your database. However, you will need to use Vercel's Postgres service. Once you have the credentials, you can add them to your .env file:

.env
DB_CONNECTION=pgsql
DATABASE_URL=postgres://default:**********@**********.eu-central-1.postgres.vercel-storage.com:5432/verceldb?sslmode=require
info

Don't forget to add ?sslmode=require to your DATABASE_URL.

And finally, ensure that you have the pgsql driver installed:

bun add pgsql
Redis​

Vercel only supports the memory and redis session drivers. So, we recommend using the memory driver for your application if you do not have a redis server.

You can however use Vercel KV. Once you have the credentials, you can add them to your .env file:

.env
REDIS_URL=redis://default:**********@**********.kv.vercel-storage.com:32857

Once that's done, you can use the redis driver for your application:

config/session.ts
export default {

    /**
     * --------------------------------------------------------------------------
     * Default Session Driver
     * --------------------------------------------------------------------------
     *
     * This option controls the default session "driver" that will be used on
     * requests. By default, we will use the lightweight native driver but
     * you may specify any of the other wonderful drivers provided here.
     *
     * Supported: "memory", "file", "redis"
     *
     * See: "bootstrap > resolvers.ts"
     */

    driver: 'redis',

    ...

The next step would be to update your redis' default connection in the config/database.{imba,ts} file:

config/database.ts
export default {

    ...

    /**
     * --------------------------------------------------------------------------
     * Redis Databases
     * --------------------------------------------------------------------------
     *
     * You can configure your redis databases here.
     */

    redis: {
        default: {
            url: helpers.env('REDIS_URL'),
            database: helpers.env('REDIS_DB', '0'),
            tls: true
        }
    }
}
tip

In the default redis connection, we set tls to true. This is because Vercel KV uses TLS. And we removed the host, port and password options because they are not needed.

Package Lock​

Please ensure that you remove your package-lock.json, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml or bun.lockb file before deploying to Vercel. You may encounter some issues if you don't.