Deploy to Render

Render is a “deploy from git” PaaS similar in shape to Railway, with first-party Postgres / Redis but no managed MongoDB. The standard pattern: Render hosts the app, MongoDB Atlas hosts the DB. Render’s free tier suspends after inactivity (cold start ~30s); the $7/mo Starter tier is the practical floor.

Quick reference


Cost (small app)	$7/mo (Render Starter) + Atlas free tier
Managed Mongo?	No — external (MongoDB Atlas recommended)
Cold start?	Yes on free tier; no on Starter+
TLS	Automatic on `*.onrender.com` + custom domains
Blueprint	Yes (`render.yaml`)

Prerequisites

A Render account.
A MongoDB Atlas cluster (free M0 tier is fine for small apps).
The dAvePi project pushed to GitHub.

Deploy

Provision Atlas. Create a free M0 cluster. Add a database user; allowlist 0.0.0.0/0 if you can’t pin Render’s egress IPs (Atlas allows IP allowlists, but Render’s egress isn’t a stable single IP on most plans). For production, use a private endpoint or pin a stable egress IP via a network-add-on.
Create a Render Web Service. New + → Web Service → connect the GitHub repo. Render auto-detects Node.
Configure the service. Build command: npm install. Start command: npm start. Health check path: /healthz.

Set env vars. Under the service’s Environment tab:

NODE_ENV=production
MONGO_URI=mongodb+srv://user:pass@cluster.mongodb.net/davepi
TOKEN_KEY=<long random string>
CORS_ORIGINS=https://your-frontend.example.com

Render sets PORT itself; dAvePi reads it via the PORT env in index.js.

Deploy. First build runs on save. Render builds, deploys, and routes traffic once /healthz returns 200.

One-click blueprint

The repo ships a render.yaml blueprint at the root. Render’s “Deploy to Render” flow (from a fork of the repo, or via the Blueprints section of the dashboard) uses it to provision the service in one click — auto-generating TOKEN_KEY, prompting for MONGO_URI + CORS_ORIGINS (marked sync: false so the secret values stay out of the repo), and setting TRUST_PROXY=true so the rate limiter keys on real client IPs behind Render’s edge proxy.

Custom domain + TLS

Service → Settings → Custom Domain. Render provides the CNAME target. Let’s Encrypt cert provisions within ~minutes of DNS propagation. Auto-renews.

Backups

Atlas’s free tier doesn’t include continuous backup; the M10 ($57/mo) tier does. On the free tier, schedule a mongodump from a Render cron job:

New + → Cron Job → same repo. Build command: npm install. Run command: a small Node script that runs mongodump and writes to S3.

Or upgrade Atlas to M10+ and use the built-in continuous backup

point-in-time recovery.

Scaling

Vertical: bump the Render plan (Starter → Standard → Pro).
Horizontal: Render supports auto-scaling on Standard+ plans. dAvePi is stateless; Atlas handles the database tier separately.
Atlas tier: M0 (free) → M10 ($57/mo) is the practical step up. M10 unlocks continuous backup, point-in-time recovery, and meaningful storage / IOPS.

Observability

Logs: Render captures stdout, displays live + retains 30 days. Ship to external collectors via the log-drain integration (Datadog / Papertrail / Better Stack).
Metrics: /_metrics is reachable from outside Render via the public URL; gate with METRICS_TOKEN. Configure Grafana Cloud to scrape it.