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

Three env files, not four

Fastman 0.4.0+ scaffolds three environment files:

File	Purpose
.env	Fallback / local override (gitignored by default)
.env.develop	Local development settings
.env.staging	Staging environment settings

There is intentionally no .env.production. Production secrets should come from a real secrets manager — AWS SSM, HashiCorp Vault, Kubernetes Secrets, Doppler, or your deployment platform's env-var UI — not from a committed file. Pretending to scaffold a .env.production invites placeholder credentials into version control.

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

# Use develop settings
fastman serve --env=develop

# Use staging settings
fastman serve --env=staging

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

Production Configuration

In production, do not ship a .env.production file. Instead, inject environment variables through your platform:

Platform	Where to set vars
Docker / Compose	environment: section or env_file: pointing to a secrets-mounted file
Kubernetes	Secret + envFrom: in the pod spec
AWS ECS / Lambda	Task definition env or Secrets Manager
Fly.io	fly secrets set
Railway / Render / Vercel	Project settings UI
Bare metal / systemd	EnvironmentFile= directive

The variables your app needs at boot are the same shape as .env.staging, plus production-grade replacements:

ENVIRONMENT=production
DEBUG=false
SECRET_KEY=<from-secrets-manager>

# Database
DB_HOST=<production-host>
DB_PORT=5432
DB_USER=<from-secrets-manager>
DB_PASSWORD=<from-secrets-manager>
DB_NAME=myapp

# CORS
ALLOWED_HOSTS=["https://myapp.com","https://www.myapp.com"]

Setting ENVIRONMENT=production causes app/core/config.py to look for .env.production, fail to find it (correct!), and fall back to .env — which itself should not exist on the production host, so the app reads purely from injected env vars. That's the intended boot path.

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.