Deploy on Render

The repository’s render.yaml is a Render Blueprint. It creates a web service from the published image ghcr.io/deejpotter/day-planner and a Postgres 16 database.

Note

The Blueprint uses a paid instance type (starter), because Render only runs pre-deploy commands on paid instances, and a paid database plan.

Create the Blueprint

1. Fork the repository, or copy render.yaml into a repository of your own.
2. In Render, select New → Blueprint and choose that repository.
3. Render reads render.yaml, shows the service and database it will create, and asks for the values marked sync: false.

Fill in the prompted values

Variable	Value
BETTER_AUTH_URL	The service URL, such as https://day-planner.onrender.com, or your custom domain
ADMIN_EMAIL, ADMIN_PASSWORD	Optional: create the admin at first start
SMTP_URL	Optional: see Email

BETTER_AUTH_SECRET is generated by Render once and shared by every instance. DATABASE_URL comes from the database.

How it deploys

• Migrations run once per deploy as the pre-deploy command, on a separate instance, before the new version takes traffic. That’s why the Blueprint sets RUN_MIGRATIONS_ON_START=false.
• Health checks use /api/health.
• Rate limits use RATE_LIMIT_STORAGE=database, so they hold if you add instances.

Updating

Services that run a published image don’t redeploy when latest changes. To upgrade, change image.url to a newer version tag in render.yaml, or select Manual Deploy in Render. Keep old tags in mind for rollbacks; see Upgrading.

See also

• Running more than one instance: what changes when you scale up
• Health endpoint: what Render’s health check reads
• First-run setup: find setup_token= in the service’s logs