Deployment

An overview of how to deploy your Fastman-generated FastAPI application to production.

Pre-Deployment Checklist

Before deploying, make sure you've completed these steps:

• Set DEBUG=false in your production environment
• Generate a secure SECRET_KEY with fastman config:appkey
• Configure a production database URL (not SQLite)
• Run all pending migrations: fastman database:migrate
• Run your test suite: fastman build
• Set up proper logging and monitoring

Quick Deploy Options

Platform	Difficulty	Best For	Free Tier
Railway	Easy	Quick deploys, small projects	Yes
Render	Easy	Full-stack apps with managed databases	Yes
Fly.io	Medium	Edge deployment, global distribution	Yes
AWS ECS	Advanced	Enterprise scale, full AWS ecosystem	No
DigitalOcean App Platform	Medium	Simple container hosting	No

Environment Setup

Multi-Environment Files

Fastman generates environment files for each stage:

File	Purpose
.env	Fallback (used if no environment-specific file found)
.env.development	Local development settings
.env.staging	Staging environment settings
.env.production	Production environment settings

The active file is selected via the --env flag:

# Use development settings
fastman serve --env=development

# Use staging settings
fastman serve --env=staging

# Use production settings (or just `fastman serve` — auto-detected)
fastman serve --env=production

When no --env flag is provided, Fastman auto-detects .env.production if it exists, otherwise falls back to .env.

Production Configuration

Your .env.production (or deployment platform env vars) should include:

ENVIRONMENT=production
DEBUG=false
SECRET_KEY=<your-production-secret-key>

# Database
DB_HOST=production-db-host
DB_PORT=5432
DB_USER=prod_user
DB_PASSWORD=<strong-password>
DB_NAME=myapp

# Optional CORS
CORS_ORIGINS=https://myapp.com,https://www.myapp.com

For cloud deployments, prefer your platform's environment variable management over .env files.

Generate a Secure Secret Key

fastman config:appkey --show

Copy the output and set it as the SECRET_KEY environment variable in your deployment platform.

warning

Never commit secrets to version control. Use your deployment platform's environment variable management (Railway variables, Render env groups, AWS Secrets Manager, etc.).

Health Checks

Most container orchestrators and deployment platforms need a health check endpoint. Add one to your app/main.py:

@app.get("/health")
def health_check():
    return {"status": "healthy"}

This allows load balancers and orchestrators to verify your application is running and responsive.

Procfile

For platforms that auto-detect Python projects (Railway, Render, Heroku-compatible), create a Procfile in your project root:

web: python -m uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT

Next Steps

See the Production Build guide for detailed Docker deployment, performance optimization, and reverse proxy configuration.