Render#

Pegasus supports deploying to Render as a standard Python application.

Prerequisites#

If you haven’t already, create your Render account.

To use celery you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Deploying#

Once you’ve logged into Render you can create your app as follows:

  1. In the Render dashboard, create a new blueprint

  2. Connect your GitHub or Gitlab account and select your project’s repository

  3. Configure the Service Group Name and select the branch you want to deploy from

  4. Review the configuration, add settings and click ‘Apply’

This will kick off the process to create your PostgreSQL database and Redis instances as well as deploy your web application (configured in your project’s render.yaml file).

After deploying, review the production checklist for a list of common next steps

Build Script#

The build.sh file is run by Render to run the commands needed to build the app, as described here. This is also where “release” commands like collectstatic and migrate run.

If there are other commands (e.g. ./manage.py bootstrap_subscriptions) that you want to run on every deploy you can add them to build.sh.

If you enable celery, it will use the build_celery.sh file, which runs the basic build steps, but not the “release” commands. You generally should not need to modify this file.

Settings and Secrets#

Render builds use the settings_production.py file. You can add settings here or in the base settings.py file, and use environment variables to manage any secrets, following the examples in these files.

Environment variables can be managed from the “Environment” tab on your app’s dashboard.

Running One-Off Commands#

You can run one-off commands in the Render shell (paid plan required) or via SSH.

Celery Support#

To run celery workers on Render you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Then in your render.yaml file uncomment the ‘celery’ section and rebuild from the steps above.

If you previously deployed your application you can choose “Update Existing Resources” to avoid having to recreate your app / database / redis instance.

Troubleshooting#

Sometimes Render fails to build on the first deployment. Retrying the deployment from the same commit seems to resolve this.

Container-based deployment#

It is possible to use Render’s docker-based support to deploy Pegasus apps, but it is not recommended because there is no “release” phase, which makes it difficult to set up things like database migraitons.

More details can be found in this support thread.