There are many ways to deploy Payload to a production environment. When evaluating how you will deploy Payload, you need to consider these main aspects:
Payload features a suite of security features that you can rely on to strengthen your application's security. When deploying to Production, it's a good idea to double-check that you are making proper use of each of them.
When you initialize Payload, you provide it with a secret
property. This property should be impossible to guess and extremely difficult for brute-force attacks to crack. Make sure your Production secret
is a long, complex string. It's often best practice to store it in an env
file which is not checked into your Git repository, using dotenv
to supply it to your payload.init
call.
Because you are in complete control of who can do what with your data, you should double and triple-check that you wield that power responsibly before deploying to Production.
Before running in Production, you need to have built a production-ready copy of the Payload Admin panel. To do this, Payload provides the build
NPM script. You can use it by adding a script
to your package.json
file like this:
package.json
:
{"name": "project-name-here","scripts": {"build": "payload build",},"dependencies": {// your dependencies},
Then, to build Payload, you would run npm run build
in your project folder. A production-ready Admin bundle will be created in the build
directory.
Make sure you set the environment variable NODE_ENV
to production
. Based on this variable, many Node packages automatically optimize themselves. In production, Payload automatically disables the GraphQL Playground, serves a production-ready version of the Admin panel, and other changes.
You should be using an SSL certificate for production Payload instances, which means you can enable secure cookies in your Authentication-enabled Collection configs.
Payload comes with a robust set of built-in anti-abuse measures, such as locking out users after X amount of failed login attempts, request rate limiting, GraphQL query complexity limits, max depth
settings, and more. Click here to learn more.
If you are using a persistent filesystem-based cloud host such as a DigitalOcean Droplet or an Amazon EC2 server, you might opt to install MongoDB directly on that server itself so that Node can communicate with it locally. With this approach, you can benefit from faster response times, but scaling can become more involved as your app's user base grows.
Alternatively, you can rely on a third-party MongoDB host such as MongoDB Atlas. With Atlas or a similar cloud provider, you can trust them to take care of your database's availability, security, redundancy, and backups.
If you are using Payload to manage file uploads, you need to consider where your uploaded files will be permanently stored. If you do not use Payload for file uploads, then this section does not impact your app whatsoever.
Some cloud app hosts such as Heroku use ephemeral
file systems, which means that any files uploaded to your server only last until the server restarts or shuts down. Heroku and similar providers schedule restarts and shutdowns without your control, meaning your uploads will accidentally disappear without any way to get them back.
Alternatively, persistent filesystems will never delete your files and can be trusted to reliably host uploads perpetually.
Popular cloud providers with ephemeral filesystems:
Popular cloud providers with persistent filesystems:
If you don't use Payload's upload
functionality, you can go ahead and use Heroku or similar platform easily. Everything will work exactly as you want it to.
But, if you do, and you still want to use an ephemeral filesystem provider, you can write a hook-based solution to copy the files your users upload to a more permanent storage solution like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces.
To automatically send uploaded files to S3 or similar, you could:
beforeChange
hook for all Collections that support Uploads, which takes any uploaded file
from the Express req
and sends it to an S3 bucketafterRead
hook for the filename
field that automatically adjusts the filename
stored to add its full S3 URLafterDelete
hook that automatically deletes files from the S3 bucketWith the above configuration, deploying to Heroku or similar becomes no problem.
DigitalOcean provides extremely helpful documentation that can walk you through the entire process of creating a production-ready Droplet to host your Payload app: