Documentation improvement suggestions - production deployment

[hades200082]

After deploying my first two Payload CMS applications to different places I feel that the existing documentation, while excellent for developers and during development, has very little "real world" info for deploying Payload CMS as a production application.

There were a number of things I hit during deployments (as a newbie to deploying Payload but with 25+ years of commercial software development & systems architecture under my belt)

My proposal in this thread is that a section be added to the Payload documentation where more detailed deployment instructions can be placed for various cloud platforms.

As a minimum I'd recommend:

• Azure (App Service with MongoDB Atlas and CosmoDB variants maybe)
• AWS
• GCS

Additionally, many Payload users may benefit from more detailed guides for:

• Railway
• Digital Ocean
• ... maybe a few others I've seen mentioned on Discord.

For example, some of the issues I hit with Azure ...

1. Admin UI kept trying to look at localhost:3000 for the API
Need a way to set the serverUrl in the payload config that both allows for different environments (i.e. deployment to different app services, or app service deployment slots) and works for both the Express app and the Admin UI.

2. PAYLOAD_PUBLIC_ environment variables don't get passed to Admin UI if you use CI/CD/DevOps deployments or Dockerfile deployment
For Dockerfile deployments these need to also be added as ENV lines in the Dockerfile, which means
a) each environment needs its own Dockerfile - not ideal.
b) these Dockerfiles need to be committed to git where you may not want to expose certain things

For regular ZipDeploy from DevOps (or WebDeploy), the same issue occurs but I wasn't able to solve it.

3. When not using Dockerfile deployment, the listen port in Payload needs to be set from an environment variable
Azure creates this variable by default, but a code change is needed to use it. Since using a PORT environment variable is fairly common across different cloud hosts it might be worth adding this to the default install.

At the end on Azure, I had to create a separate Dockerfile for each environment. an Azure Container Registry to build & push them to from DevOps and it took a lot of fiddling and figuring out to get working overall.

The other deployment I've done was to Railway which, while somewhat simpler, but still required the PORT change and has issues with MongoDB Atlas (you have to open your Atlas instance to all IP addresses :( )