Production Deployment

Guide: Production Deployment

This guide covers deploying ɳSelf to a production VPS from scratch.

Server Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	2 vCPU	4 vCPU
RAM	4 GB	8 GB
Disk	40 GB SSD	80 GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04	Ubuntu 22.04

Tested providers: Hetzner CX23 (2 vCPU / 4 GB) meets the minimum for a standard stack.

Firewall Rules

Open only the ports your server needs:

Port	Direction	Purpose
80	Inbound	HTTP (redirects to HTTPS)
443	Inbound	HTTPS
22	Inbound	SSH admin access

Close to external access: 5432 (Postgres), 8080 (Hasura), 4000 (Auth), and all other internal service ports. ɳSelf routes all external traffic through Nginx on 80/443.

Example with ufw:

ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw default deny incoming
ufw enable

DNS Setup

Create an A record pointing your domain to the server IP:

A  example.com          → 1.2.3.4
A  *.example.com        → 1.2.3.4   # wildcard for subdomains

Wait for DNS propagation (up to 24 hours) before running TLS setup.

Installation

# Install nSelf CLI
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://install.nself.org)"

# Verify
nself version

Initialise and Build

# Create project with production environment
nself init myproject --env prod

# Review and edit .env.prod
# Set: BASE_DOMAIN, HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET, JWT secrets, Postgres password

# Generate docker-compose and nginx config
nself build

# Start all services
nself start

Verify Deployment

# Check all services are healthy
nself health

# List service URLs
nself urls

Ongoing Maintenance

Task	Command
Update CLI	`nself update`
Apply config changes	`nself build && nself restart`
View service status	`nself status`
Tail logs	`nself logs`
Check health	`nself health`