What is Deployment?

When we build web applications, we want everyone to be able to access these web applications and websites using a URL in their web browsers without having to run any commands on their terminal. This is what deployment is all about.

Deployment is the process of moving our source code from our local computer to a public host (server or cloud platforms). It is simply the act of releasing your project for the rest of the world to see and use.

Before cloud platforms, such as Netlify, Vercel, Heroku, Firebase, and Azure, we handled hosting via hosting providers. These hosting providers, such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostinger, and so on, required us to upload our static assets (such as a project build folder, which primarily consists of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) every time we made changes. This upload is accomplished through FTP software or a system such as cPanel, which can be stressful and technical.

Developers now have access to cloud platforms that make deployments simple, thanks to the rise of Git providers such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.

Advantages

• It saves time: Deploying our applications to platforms saves time because we can deploy from our terminal or import our project from GitHub.

• Continuous deployment: It enables us to implement continuous deployment, which means that whenever we make changes to our application and push its source code to our Git provider, these cloud platforms are automatically triggered, and our application redeploys to reflect all new updates.

• It is cheaper: Instead of worrying about security and hosting for our basic projects, we can use these Git providers and cloud platforms, which are secure and offer free hosting.

Preparing our application for deployment

We want to ensure that sensitive information, such as our API keys and payment details in our source code, is safe from hackers before releasing our code online. For this application, we don't have to worry about this because our information isn't confidential, but it's still important to understand these best practices.