Deploying your first Prepress application

What you’ll need

Before you can deploy your app please check you have the following:

• A Cloud 66 Account — If you don’t already have one Sign up for a free Cloud 66 account. You’ll get free unlimited access to all products for 4 weeks.
• A Git Repo containing your application code — This can be a public or private repo. You can use any Git provider like GitHub / BitBucket or use your own privately hosted repo.
• A Cloud Account — at the moment we only support AWS S3 (we will be adding more cloud providers soon)

1. Choose your application type

New users will be shown the product selection wizard. For Prepress, click the Getting Started button in the block headed “Need to Deploy a Static Site?”.

If you’re already using Cloud 66 just click New Application → Prepress button on the dashboard.

2. Access your Git Repo

Cloud 66 supports both public and private Git repositories. If you’re using a private Git repository you’ll need to Add and approve the Cloud 66 public SSH key with your Git provider.

Click the How to link Cloud 66 with your git provider link above the main panel - this will open up a yellow box that will allow you to configure access to your git provider.

3. Define your application

• Connect your Git provider (see above) and select one of your repos
  • OR click the link to switch to manual mode and then paste in the Git repo URL for your app (we support http://, git:// and git@ URL formats. HTTPS isn’t supported.)
• Define the branch do you want to deploy — This defaults to master but you can provide any branch you like.
• Choose an Environment — decide which environment you’re deploying to: Development, QA, Staging or Production.
• Give your new application a name — This is the name that will be used in the Cloud 66 Dashboard once your app is deployed.

Now click the Analyze button - the results will be displayed in a few seconds.

4. Configuring your application

Once the analysis is complete you’ll see a yellow Information box that you can use to verify the analysis is correct.

If there are any problems you can make changes and click Reanalyze my code. If necessary, you can also add environment variables.

5. Choosing a deployment target

If you’re deploying for the first time you need to add your Cloud provider credentials.

At the moment Prepress only supports S3 from Amazon Web Services. To add your AWS account:

1. Click the Add Cloud Provider button
2. Paste in the AWS Access key ID & AWS Secret Access Key (see below for how to generate these)
3. Give your deployment target a name (this makes it easier to distinguish between multiple accounts)
4. Click Add Cloud Provider
5. Choose the region in which you want to host your app

Setting up cloud & access keys on AWS S3

1. Log into the web interface for your AWS account
2. Click on the name of your account in the top right corner of your AWS account, and select My Security Credentials.
3. Click Access keys in the accordion to open the panel
4. Click Create New Access key
5. Either download the key file or click Show access key and take note of your access key ID and secret access key. These are the credentials needed for Cloud 66 to access your account.

This gives Cloud 66 root access to your account. If you’d prefer to restrict access to the minimum needed, we suggest using Amazon’s IAM. Please read our full guide on setting up AWS for more info.

6. Deploy your app

Now everything is ready to go, hit the Deploy site button.

During the build and deployment process you can view the log to see what’s happening behind the scenes.

What’s Next?

• Setting up DNS records for your Prepress app
• Configuring continuous deployment using redeployment hooks
• Setting up preview deployments

Need help with deployments?

Contact Support

More Questions?

Join the Slack Channel