Render.com offers a free tier that includes 750 hours of compute time per month. This is enough to run a single proxy instance 24/7. Instances shut down after 15 minutes without traffic but start up again automatically when a request is received. You can use something like https://app.checklyhq.com/ to ping your proxy every 15 minutes to keep it alive.
- [Sign up for Render.com](https://render.com/) to create an account and access the dashboard.
### 2. Create a service using a Blueprint
Render allows you to deploy and auutomatically configure a repository containing a [render.yaml](../render.yaml) file using its Blueprints feature. This is the easiest way to get started.
- Click the **Blueprints** tab at the top of the dashboard.
- Click **New Blueprint Instance**.
- Under **Public Git repository**, enter `https://gitlab.com/khanon/oai-proxy`.
- Note that this is not the GitGud repository, but a mirror on GitLab.
The service will be created according to the instructions in the `render.yaml` file. Don't wait for it to complete as it will fail due to missing environment variables. Instead, proceed to the next step.
- Click the name of the service you just created, which may show as "Deploy failed".
- Click the **Environment** tab.
- Click **Add Secret File**.
- Under **Filename**, enter `.env`.
- Under **Contents**, enter all of your environment variables, one per line, in the format `NAME=value`.
- For example, `OPENAI_KEY=sk-abc123`.
- Click **Save Changes**.
The service will automatically rebuild and deploy with the new environment variables. This will take a few minutes. The link to your deployed proxy will appear at the top of the page.
If you want to change the URL, go to the **Settings** tab of your Web Service and click the **Edit** button next to **Name**. You can also set a custom domain, though I haven't tried this yet.
To update your server, go to the page for your Web Service and click **Manual Deploy** > **Deploy latest commit**. This will pull the latest version of the code and redeploy the server.
_If you have trouble with this, you can also try selecting **Clear build cache & deploy** instead from the same menu._
## Adding a greeting message
To show a greeting message on the Server Info page, set the `GREETING_URL` environment variable within Render to the URL of a Markdown file. This URL should point to a raw text file, not an HTML page. You can use a public GitHub Gist or GitLab Snippet for this. For example: `GREETING_URL=https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2542011/raw/main/greeting.md`. You can change the title of the page by setting the `SERVER_TITLE` environment variable.
Don't set `GREETING_URL` in the `.env` secret file you created earlier; it must be set in Render's environment variables section for it to work correctly.
## Customizing the server
You can customize the server by editing the `.env` configuration you created earlier. Refer to [.env.example](../.env.example) for a list of all available configuration options. Further information can be found in the [config.ts](../src/config.ts) file.
