Deployment & hosting

How vly apps deploy, what infrastructure they run on, environments, and the patterns for going from preview to production.

vly apps deploy automatically. There’s no git push, no CI step, no Dockerfile to write. Every change you make produces a new deploy in seconds. This page is the mental model for how it works and what your levers are.

What you get out of the box

Auto-deploy on every change

Every successful build produces a new preview deployment. No action required.

Free `*.vly.app` URL

Every project gets a public URL. SSL included.

Custom domain support

Bring your own domain in five minutes. SSL via Let’s Encrypt, automatic.

Two environments

Preview (auto, every change) and Production (promoted on demand).

Per-environment secrets

Different API keys for preview vs. production. No copy-paste between environments.

Built-in monitoring

Deployment logs, error tracking, basic performance metrics out of the box.

How a deploy happens

The whole pipeline runs in 10–30 seconds for a typical change. The preview URL updates atomically — there’s no half-deployed state.

Environments

1. Preview

   Every revision automatically deploys here. Public URL, but unindexed by search engines (X-Robots-Tag: noindex). Connect any number of preview environments to test in parallel.

2. Production

   Promoted from a specific preview revision. Connected to your custom domain. Indexed by default.

The promotion model is manual: you pick a preview, click “Promote to production”, and it’s live within seconds. This avoids accidentally shipping unfinished work.

Staging vs production →

Environment variables and secrets

Every environment has its own secrets. The pattern:

Environment	Stripe key	OpenAI key	What
Preview	sk_test_...	Production OpenAI key (same; usage is small in preview)	Test mode for billing
Production	sk_live_...	Same OpenAI key	Real charges

Set per-environment from Settings → Environments → [env] → Secrets. See Environment variables and Secrets management.

Custom domains

Point any domain at your vly app:

1. In vly: add the domain

   Settings → Domains → Add domain. Enter app.yourcompany.com.

2. At your DNS provider: add the records

   vly shows you the records. Typically a CNAME pointing to cname.vly.app.

3. Wait ~5 minutes

   DNS propagates and Let’s Encrypt provisions an SSL cert.

4. Test

   Open your domain. You should see your production app over HTTPS.

For apex domains (yourcompany.com instead of app.yourcompany.com), you’ll use ALIAS / ANAME records — see Custom domains for the full walkthrough including DNSSEC, redirects, and multi-environment setups.

Rolling back

If a production deploy turns out to be broken:

Instant rollback

From the production deploy timeline, click any prior deploy and select “Rollback to here”. Live in seconds.

Re-promote a different preview

Same effect, slightly different mechanism. Pick a known-good preview and promote it.

Rollbacks do not undo schema migrations. If your bad deploy added a field, the field stays after rollback (the new code path that uses it is gone, but the field is still there). For schema changes, ship them separately from feature changes when possible.

Staging environments

For teams that want a “shared QA” environment between preview and production:

1. Create a staging environment

   Settings → Environments → Add environment named “staging”.

2. Configure secrets

   Use either test-mode keys (like preview) or production keys (like prod) depending on what you’re testing.

3. Promote with two steps

   Preview → staging (manual) → production (manual). Two gates instead of one.

Staging vs production patterns →

What’s running where

A vly app has three layers, all hosted by vly’s managed infrastructure:

Layer	What
Frontend	React + Vite bundle on a global CDN. Static assets, ~30ms cold-start.
Backend (Convex functions)	Queries / mutations / actions. Region-local for latency.
Database (Convex)	Replicated, with automatic backups.

You don’t choose regions; vly picks the closest one to your users automatically. For multi-region requirements, contact us.

Dive deeper

Custom domains

DNS, SSL, apex domains, redirects, multi-environment routing.

Environments

Adding, configuring, deleting environments.

Environment variables

Setting and reading env vars.

Secrets

The secrets store: encryption, scoping, audit.

DNS setup

Provider-specific DNS guides (Cloudflare, Namecheap, GoDaddy, Google).

SSL certificates

Provisioning, renewal, custom certificates.

Staging vs production

Patterns for safe promotion.

Rollback

The instant-rollback mechanism.

Preview deployments

Multi-preview workflows for collaborative review.

Monitoring

Logs, metrics, alerting.