Orientation: what shipping means

1. The promise

You'll know the shape of Ch 24, what "deployed" actually buys you as an engineer, and roughly what putting your app online costs in money and time. By the end of the chapter you'll have a live URL you can paste on your resume.

2. The mental model

Deploying is moving a meal you cooked at home to a real restaurant. The recipe is the same. The kitchen is now in a public building. There's a sign on the street with your name on it. Strangers can walk in and order.

Most of this chapter is about the building, the sign, and the staff training. Not the recipe.

A few terms you'll meet over and over.

• Deploy — putting code on a machine that's reachable from the public internet.
• Production — the environment your real users hit.
• Staging — a near-identical copy of production for testing before production.
• Free tier — the hosting plan that costs nothing if your traffic stays small.

(DIAGRAM: the shape of Ch 24 — flowchart — boxes for "pick the unit", "pick the host", "domain & HTTPS", "environments & secrets", "CI/CD", "preview deploys", "migrations", "rollback & zero-downtime", arrows in order)

3. You do it, with me

There's nothing to install in this unit. Read along.

Open the chapter index in your browser.

(SCREENSHOT: the chapter index for Ch 24 — full window — unit 24.0 highlighted)

The chapter walks in this order. Same order as the unit list above.

• 24.1 to 24.3 — the deploy itself. What it is, what shape it takes, and which host fits each part of your app.
• 24.4 to 24.6 — the three walkthroughs. Vercel for the front end, Railway or Fly for the back end, Neon for the database.
• 24.7 and 24.8 — domains and HTTPS. Your custom name and the lock icon next to it.
• 24.9 and 24.10 — three environments, and the secrets that keep them separate.
• 24.11 and 24.12 — the robot teammate. GitHub Actions on every push, preview URLs on every PR.
• 24.13 to 24.15 — migrations, rollback, and zero-downtime. The grown-up parts.
• 24.assign — ship the full-stack app.

Now the cost map. Most pieces have a free tier you'll use for the assignment.

(SCREENSHOT: Vercel pricing page at vercel.com/pricing — full window — Hobby tier highlighted)

The one piece that costs real money is the domain name. A .com runs around A$15 to A$30 per year at Cloudflare Registrar or Namecheap.

(SCREENSHOT: Namecheap domain search page with a search for the student's chosen domain — full window — the price column visible)

What this chapter will not cover: Kubernetes, multi-region failover, autoscaling tuning, custom CDNs. You'll know what each of those words means by the end of Block 8. You won't build any of them.

4. What you should be seeing

You can answer these three questions out loud:

1. What does "deployed" give you that "running on localhost" doesn't?
2. Roughly how much money does the chapter assignment cost?
3. What order does the chapter walk through?

If you can answer all three, you're done with this unit.

5. Common stumbles

• You pick a free tier without reading the limits. Day three, you hit the cap and think you broke something. Read the limits page on the host's site before you sign up.
• You try to skip ahead to "production" without doing staging first. The chapter assignment won't pass without a staging environment. Do them in order.
• You compare hosting prices at zero traffic and assume those numbers hold at scale. They don't. The cost shape changes at 10,000 users.

6. You should know