Part 3 — Ship
What you'll do#
- Prepare what you built for somewhere other than your laptop
- Deploy it
- Verify it from outside, as a stranger would
Steps#
Configuration that was hardcoded becomes a setting; anything secret moves out of the files entirely. Name every value the deployed version needs.
Fill this in with the real commands or clicks. If there is more than one supported way, pick one for the tutorial and mention the others at the end — a reader choosing between three paths mid-tutorial usually chooses none.
Open the public address from a different network or device. Your own machine has caches, sessions and DNS that a stranger does not.
The error handling you wrote in part two is now handling real conditions. Try one bad input against the deployed version.
Keys and tokens belong in the platform's own settings, not in the repository — and if one ever lands there, rotate it rather than deleting the commit. Deleting is slow, and the key is live the whole time.
When the deployed version behaves differently#
Almost always one of: a missing environment variable, a different version of a runtime, a path that only exists on your machine, or a file that was never committed. Check those four before anything else.
What you have now#
Something real, at an address you can send someone. That is the whole point of the series, and it is worth telling one person about before you go back to improving it.