ente/web/docs/deploy.md

Deploying the web apps

tl;dr;

yarn deploy:photos

Details

The various web apps (Ente Photos, Ente Auth) are deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

The deployment is done using the GitHub app provided by Cloudflare Pages. The Cloudflare integration watches for pushes to all branches named "deploy/*". In all cases, it runs the same script, scripts/deploy.sh, using the CF_PAGES_BRANCH environment variable to decide what exactly to build (CF docs).

For each of these branches, we have configured CNAME aliases (Cloudflare calls them Custom Domains) to give a stable URL to the deployments.

• deploy/photos → web.ente.io
• deploy/auth → auth.ente.io
• deploy/accounts → accounts.ente.io
• deploy/cast → cast.ente.io

Thus to trigger a, say, production deployment of the photos app, we can open and merge a PR into the deploy/photos branch. Cloudflare will then build and deploy the code to web.ente.io.

The command yarn deploy:photos just does that - it'll open a new PR to fast forward the current main onto deploy/photos. There are similar yarn deploy:* commands for the other apps.

Other subdomains

Apart from this, there are also some subdomains:

• albums.ente.io is a CNAME alias to the production deployment (web.ente.io). However, when the code detects that it is being served from albums.ente.io, it redirects to the /shared-albums page (Enhancement: serve it as a separate app with a smaller bundle size).

• payments.ente.io and family.ente.io are currently in a separate repositories (Enhancement: bring them in here).

NODE_VERSION

In Cloudflare Pages setting the NODE_VERSION environment variables is defined.

This determines which version of Node is used when we do yarn build:foo. Currently this is set to 20.11.1. The major version here should match that of @types/node in our dev dependencies.

It is a good idea to also use the same major version of node on your machine. For example, for macOS you can install the the latest from the v20 series using brew install node@20.

Adding a new app

1. Add a mapping in scripts/deploy.sh.

2. Add a Custom Domain in Cloudflare pointing to this branch's deployment.