Smart Deploy

Highlights

Table of Contents

• Highlights
• The problem
• What Smart Deploy does
• Workflow
• Deploy targets
• Blueprint & preview
• Architecture overview
• Tech stack

• License

The problem

Most deployment tools ask you to commit before you can see the plan.

• A PaaS moves fast, but the real deploy path stays hidden until something breaks.
• Raw cloud tooling gives control, but dumps the whole surface area on you at once.
• Solo developers need a middle path: ship quickly without flying blind.

Smart Deploy is built around preview. You should know what will run, how traffic will flow, and which cloud resources are involved before you press deploy.

What Smart Deploy does

• Scans your repository to detect services, frameworks, and deploy shape
• Analyzes deploy shape — single or multi-service, static site, Railpack build, or existing Docker image
• Renders a preview pipeline — branch, build units, CodeBuild output, ECS or S3 target, ALB routing, and domain
• Lets you edit in preview mode — branch, region, env vars, secrets, and hosted subdomain before deploy
• Deploys to real cloud primitives — CodeBuild, ECR, ECS Fargate, ALB, Route 53, S3, CloudFront, and GCP — with logs and history tied to the same workflow
• Tracks deployment health with background reconciliation so status reflects what is actually reachable
• Stores per-deployment secrets in AWS Secrets Manager for ECS workloads

Workflow

Smart Deploy is organized around three steps:

1. Scan & define — Connect a repo and run Smart Analysis to resolve deploy units and target shape.
2. Preview — Open the blueprint, review the deployment path, and adjust config before anything runs.
3. Deploy — Start the deploy when the preview looks right, then follow live logs, run history, and health updates.

flowchart LR
  A[Repo scan] --> B[Blueprint preview]
  B --> C{Plan looks right?}
  C -->|Edit| B
  C -->|Yes| D[Deploy]
  D --> E[Logs & health]

Deploy targets

Custom deployment URLs use Route 53 subdomains (for example myapp.yourdomain.com) with wildcard ALB routing on AWS. See docs/CUSTOM_DOMAINS.md.

Blueprint & preview

The blueprint is the center of the product. It answers one question before deploy:

What exactly is going to happen to this app?

The preview walks through the full pipeline before anything runs:

• Auth & resolve ref — repo, branch, and commit
• Build — deploy units, build contexts, and CodeBuild output (ECR images or S3 artifacts)
• Setup — region, Fargate networking, or CloudFront bucket
• Deploy — runtime env vars (Secrets Manager on ECS), ALB host rules, cache invalidation
• Done — hosted subdomain and public URL

Each step surfaces the artifacts involved — Railpack plans, Docker build units, ECS prerequisites, and domain routing — so the deploy path stays inspectable. You can adjust branch, region, env vars, and subdomain from the same preview surface without losing context.

Architecture overview

Tech stack

• Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui
• Better Auth, Supabase
• GraphQL (Yoga) + REST API routes
• WebSocket worker for deploy execution
• AWS SDK, GCP client libraries
• Vitest, Playwright

License

Smart Deploy is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE.

Smart Deploy was created and is maintained by Anirudh Raghavendra Makuluri.

Forks and derivative projects should preserve the required license and attribution notices, and should not imply that they are the official Smart Deploy project unless explicitly authorized.