Add and deploy an application

This guide takes you from an empty Applications list to a running application — the first thing most people do once a server is connected.

Before you start: you need a connected server. If you haven't connected one yet, do that first — strackt needs somewhere to run your application.

1. Add the application

From the Applications area, choose New application and give strackt three things:

• a name for the application
• the repository it lives in, and the branch to deploy
• the public path — the folder your web server serves (for many apps this is public)

strackt connects to your repository and takes a first look at the code.

2. Confirm what strackt detected

strackt reads your repository and works out what the application needs to run — the language version, and whether it uses a database, a cache, background workers, or a scheduler. You don't fill any of this in by hand; strackt detects it and shows you the result.

Review the list and confirm it. If something looks wrong or you know you need something that wasn't detected, you can adjust it here. What you confirm is what strackt sets up on the server.

3. Let strackt prepare the server

Once you confirm, strackt configures the server for what your application needs — the right language version, any database or cache, workers, and the web server in front of it. This runs in the background and you can watch its progress. When it finishes, the server is ready for your code.

4. Deploy

Choose Deploy. strackt runs the deploy for you and shows each step live:

1. Fetches your code at the chosen branch
2. Installs dependencies and builds assets
3. Checks the application can start and reach its database
4. Runs any database migrations
5. Switches your application over to the new release

Your current version keeps serving visitors until the new release is ready. If a deploy fails, nothing is taken down — visitors keep getting the last version that deployed successfully, and you can fix the change and deploy again.

What to expect along the way

strackt checks before it deploys. If a required setting is missing or a service isn't connected yet, strackt tells you exactly what's missing and links you straight to where to fix it — instead of starting a deploy that would fail partway through.

Deploys repeat from a clean state. Every deploy runs the same steps from the start, so a retry after a fix behaves the same as a first deploy.

Once it's running

Your application is live on your server. From here you'll usually want to point a domain at it and get a certificate, manage its environment variables, and connect the databases or caches it needs — each of those has its own short guide.

If a deploy fails, see When a deploy fails for what it means and how to get running again.