Solid App Template

Deployment starting points for applications generated from the create-solid-app template.

Template Deployment Overview

This guide explains how to deploy a Solid application generated from the create-solid-app template.

The template gives you two practical starting paths:

Manual deployment, where the backend and frontend are built and run as separate processes.
Docker deployment, where the backend and frontend are packaged as containers and run through Docker Compose or a container platform.

Mental Model

The generated template already separates the deployment concerns for solid-api and solid-ui.

Use this page to understand the template-level deployment shape before choosing a VM, Docker, or ECS guide.

This approach involves building the frontend and backend applications and running them as separate processes.

Node.js and npm installed on your server.
A database such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB running and accessible from your server.

git clone <your-project-repository>
cd <your-project-directory>

Navigate to the solid-api directory:

cd solid-api

Install dependencies:

npm install

Create a .env file and configure your database connection and other environment variables. You can use .env.example as a reference.

Build the application:

npm run build

Run the application:

npm run start:prod

Navigate to the solid-ui directory:

cd ../solid-ui

Install dependencies:

npm install

Create a .env file and configure your API URL and other environment variables.

Build the application:

npm run build

Run the application:

npm run start

Process Management

For a long-running production server, use a process manager such as PM2 to keep the backend process alive and restart it after server reboots.

This approach uses Docker to containerize the frontend and backend applications.

git clone <your-project-repository>
cd <your-project-directory>

Create a .env file in the root of your project and configure your database connection, API URL, and other environment variables.

The docker-compose.yml file is set up to use this root .env file.

Secrets

Do not commit real .env files. Keep production credentials out of source control and out of container images.

docker-compose up -d --build

This command builds the Docker images for the solid-api and solid-ui applications and runs them in the background.

Your Solid application is now running and accessible on the ports specified in your docker-compose.yml file.

Use Virtual Machine for a full host-level production setup with PM2, Nginx, and SSL.
Use Docker for a deeper container deployment walkthrough.
Use Amazon ECS when the Dockerized application should run on AWS Fargate.