Easily deploy open source apps with the new ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button and other App Platform enhancements

Open source software (OSS) is used widely across the tech industry. Every OSS developer hopes that their app is used extensively by users and that the broader developer community actively contributes to it. 

In addition to building open source software, developers often need to provide instructions on deploying their apps on various cloud platforms. Such instructions are typically found in README.md files in GitHub repositories, web pages, blogs, etc. However, creating and maintaining instructions that are easy to understand, detailed, and accurate is a herculean task. Having erroneous, out of date instructions can lead to an abandonment of apps and a reduction in contributions by the developer community.

DigitalOcean loves open source. Many of the libraries and frameworks we use at DigitalOcean are open source, and we always support initiatives that help the open source community thrive. We are excited to introduce the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button to help maintainers, contributors and consumers of open source software. Simply embed this button and associated link in your README.md files in GitHub repos, or web pages, and let us handle the app deployment process.

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How the button works

When your users click the button, they are guided through a few simple steps, then the app is deployed on our infrastructure via the DigitalOcean App Platform. With the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button, you can focus more on your OSS projects and not worry about the mundane, time-consuming writing of tasks and updating of instructions. Deploy this sample app to see the button in action.

Pricing for the button

There is no cost associated with adding the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button to your GitHub repositories, web pages, blogs, or what have you. When your users click the button to deploy the app, they are presented with pricing for the DigitalOcean App Platform. 

App Platform provides three pricing tiers: Starter, Basic, and Professional. The Starter tier is ideal for static sites, as you can build and deploy 3 static sites for free (each additional static site will be charged $3/month). The Basic and Professional tiers are suitable for dynamic apps.

New features for App Platform

As you may have heard, we recently released the DigitalOcean App Platform, a new, reimagined PaaS (platform as a service) offering that makes it easier to build, deploy, and scale apps. You can deploy code by simply pointing to a GitHub repository, and the App Platform will do all the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure, app runtimes, and dependencies. App Platform supports many popular languages and frameworks, like Node.js, Python, Django, Go, PHP, Laravel, React, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Gatsby, Hugo, static sites, and Docker.

In addition to introducing the ‘Deploy to DigitalOcean’ button that deploys your apps on App Platform, we have made the following enhancements:

• Pre and post deploy jobs: With pre and post deploy jobs, you can run a process either directly before or after the deployment of your app. This comes in handy to run related steps like database migrations. 
• Additional pricing plans: An app is made up of one or more components like web services, databases, workers, and so forth. When you run an app on App Platform, we deploy an instance (container) of each of the components. We have added two pricing plans under the Basic and Professional tiers to provide more flexibility in selecting container sizes.
• Memory increase for Development Database: We have increased the Development Database’s memory from 256 MB to 512 MB. There is no change in price, and you can get one instance for $7/month.

You can learn more about these enhancements and other App Platform updates like CORS policy settings, and static ‘catchall_document’ support here.

We hope you will try App Platform to deploy your web apps, websites, and APIs. Check out the docs, learning resources, and sample app , and let us know what you think!

If you’d like to have a conversation about using DigitalOcean and App Platform in your business, please feel free to contact our sales team.

Happy coding, 

Jake Levirne,

Senior Director of Product Management