Quickstart

This guide walks you through deploying a small web service from a public GitHub repository. By the end you'll have a live HTTPS URL serving your app, log streaming in the dashboard, and a deploy pipeline that redeploys on every push.

Prerequisites

You'll need two things:

• An Appentic account. Sign up at app.appentic.com with your Google account. There's nothing to install locally.
• A GitHub repository. Your service needs to listen on the port specified by the PORT environment variable and bind to 0.0.0.0 so Appentic can reach it. Most web frameworks do this by default when you use their $PORT convention.

1. Create a workspace

After signing in you'll land on your workspace dashboard. Workspaces group related projects, services, and resources together, and they're also the unit of billing. If this is your first time, Appentic creates a default workspace for you automatically, so you can skip straight to step 2.

2. Connect GitHub

From the workspace dashboard, click Connect GitHub. You'll be redirected to GitHub to install the Appentic GitHub App. Choose whether to grant access to a single repository, a subset, or an entire organisation. You can change this later from your GitHub settings without reinstalling.

The app reads repo metadata and subscribes to push webhooks on branches it has access to. It does not read the contents of private repos you haven't granted access to.

3. Create a web service

Click New service, then Web service. You'll be asked for five things:

1. Repository. Pick the GitHub repo you just connected.
2. Branch. Defaults to your repository's default branch. Every push to this branch triggers a build.
3. Machine size. Start at 256 MB / 0.25 vCPU. It's plenty for a starter app and you can resize later with no downtime.
4. Region. Pick whichever is closest to your users: us-central, eu-west, or asia-east.
5. Build & start commands. Appentic autodetects most stacks. Only fill these in if autodetect got it wrong.

Click Deploy to kick off the first build.

4. Watch the build

Appentic detects your language and framework, runs the build, and streams the logs to your browser in real time. A typical Node.js build finishes in under a minute the first time, and faster afterwards because Appentic caches dependency layers between deploys.

$ appentic build
[appentic] detected: node 20
[appentic] running: npm install
[appentic] running: npm run build
[appentic] image built: sha256:9fd1...
[appentic] deploying to us-central
[appentic] service live at https://my-app-7f2a.appentic.app

If a build fails, the dashboard highlights the failing step and shows the exact output. The previous healthy revision keeps serving traffic, so a broken build never takes your service down.

5. Visit your service

Once the build succeeds, your service is live at a free *.appentic.app subdomain with a valid TLS certificate provisioned automatically. Click the URL in the dashboard to open it. If you refresh and see your response, you've just deployed your first Appentic service.

Next steps

Now that you've got a running service, the next things most developers do are attach a database, move local config into environment variables, and point a real domain at the service. Pick whichever is most relevant to your next hour of work.