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Deployment

Strapi provides many deployment options for your project or application. Your Strapi applications can be deployed on traditional hosting servers or your preferred hosting provider.

The following documentation covers the basics of how to prepare Strapi for deployment on with several common hosting options.

Strapi Cloud

You can use Strapi Cloud to quickly deploy and host your project.

Tip

If you already created a data structure with the Content-Type Builder and added some data through the Content Manager to your local (development) Strapi instance, you can leverage the data management system to transfer data from a Strapi instance to another one.

Another possible workflow is to first create the data structure locally, push your project to a git-based repository, deploy the changes to production, and only then add content to the production instance.

General guidelines​

Hardware and software requirements​

To provide the best possible environment for Strapi the following requirements apply to development (local) and staging and production workflows.

Before installing Strapi, the following requirements must be installed on your computer:

  • Node.js: Only Active LTS or Maintenance LTS versions are supported (currently v18 and v20). Odd-number releases of Node, known as "current" versions of Node.js, are not supported (e.g. v19, v21).
  • Your preferred Node.js package manager:
  • Python (if using a SQLite database)

  • Standard build tools for your OS (the build-essentials package on most Debian-based systems)

  • Hardware specifications for your server (CPU, RAM, storage):

    HardwareRecommendedMinimum
    CPU2+ cores1 core
    Memory4GB+2GB
    Disk32GB+8GB

  • A supported database version:

DatabaseRecommendedMinimum
MySQL8.08.0
MariaDB10.610.5
PostgreSQL14.012.0
SQLite33
Database deployment

Deploying databases along with Strapi is covered in the databases guide.

  • A supported operating system:

    Operating SystemRecommendedMinimum
    Ubuntu (LTS)22.0420.04
    Debian11.x10.x
    CentOS/RHEL9.x8.x
    macOS11.010.15
    Windows Desktop1110
    Windows Server20222019

Application Configuration​

1. Configure​

We recommend using environment variables to configure your application based on the environment, for example:

/config/server.js

module.exports = ({ env }) => ({
  host: env('HOST', '0.0.0.0'),
  port: env.int('PORT', 1337),
});

Then you can create a .env file or directly set environment variables in your chosen deployment platform:

HOST=10.0.0.1
PORT=1338
Tip

To learn more about configuration details, see the configurations documentation.

2. Launch the server​

Before running your server in production you need to build your admin panel for production:

NODE_ENV=production yarn build

Run the server with the production settings:

NODE_ENV=production yarn start
Caution

We highly recommend using pm2 to manage your process.

If you need a server.js file to be able to run node server.js instead of npm run start then create a ./server.js file as follows:

path: ./server.js

const strapi = require('@strapi/strapi');
strapi.createStrapi(/* {...} */).start();
Caution

If you are developing a TypeScript-based project you must provide the distDir option to start the server. For more information, consult the TypeScript documentation.

Advanced configurations​

If you want to host the administration on another server than the API, please take a look at this dedicated section.

Additional resources​

Prerequisites

The integrations page of the Strapi website include information on how to integrate Strapi with many resources, including how to deploy Strapi on the following 3rd-party platforms:


In addition, community-maintained guides for additional providers are available in the Strapi Forum. This includes the following guides: